Toronto Star: There are two things I couldn’t help but notice last week during a brief trip to Los Angeles. One was the earthquake that shook my hotel room and scared the bejesus out of me. The second was the number of hybrid-electric vehicles on the road. Californians like their hybrid-electric cars, and it’s widely expected they will become the earliest adopters of a new generation of plug-in electric vehicles such as the Chevy Volt, the Nissan Leaf and the Prius Plug-In Hybrid. For …