One morning early this month, when it was too chilly for her flirty purple skirt and pink top, former “Baywatch” actress Alexandra Paul wrapped her bare legs in a fleece blanket and settled down for a long sidewalk vigil in Burbank, Calif.
Passersby on scooters tooted their horns, and a security guard smiled and waved as he walked by. Both he and the actress were there for the same reason: to keep an eye on a parking lot full of colorful, two-door cars behind a suburban office building.
The cars are the last surviving batch of rechargeable electric coupes built by General Motors Corp. in the late 1990s. Paul and a band of homemakers, people with desk jobs, engineers, Hollywood activists and car enthusiasts have been keeping a round-the-clock vigil to stop GM from destroying the cars.