BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT:

NEWPORT BEACH — Every morning, Randy Poulson boards a scooter and drives from Newport Shores to his workplace in Balboa. The scooter has a motor, but it makes only minimal noise — no more than a regular bicycle as the driver glides over boardwalks and across city streets.

Then, at the end of the day, Poulson plugs it back into the wall socket.

The Newport Beach native, who has been an entrepreneur most of his life, recently founded Zclipse, a store on Balboa Boulevard that offers electric scooters, motorcycles, cars and other vehicles.

Poulson, a Newport Harbor High School and Orange Coast College graduate, envisions a day in the future when gas stations and diesel fuel will give way to greener sources of energy.

In the meantime, he’s leading by example on his own commute to work, and hoping to find others who want to do the same.

“Everything is going green,” Poulson said Thursday, barely two weeks after his shop opened next door to the Crab Cooker restaurant. “Arnold Schwarzenegger is all over it. He likes electric stuff.”

Zclipse opened with little fanfare in November and plans its grand opening some time in the coming weeks. Within a few years, Poulson and owner Marc Craig hope to expand with dealerships around Southern California. The store already has a small inventory of scooters, bikes and skateboards, and orders have gone out for cars and golf carts.

When the founders got the idea for an electric vehicle business, though, they did so almost on a lark. Craig said he and Poulson were riding their electric chopper bikes — which they had bought from a Santa Barbara company — down the boardwalk in Newport Beach this summer, and they noticed the intense interest passersby had in them.

“People were clamoring around those,” Craig said. “Some people were even taking pictures.”

To help meet some of the demand for electric bikes, Zclipse allows customers to rent choppers or beach cruisers by the hour or for days at a time.

All the vehicles in the store operate on lithium or lead acid batteries and can charge within four hours in a regular wall socket.

Poulson said he plans to set electric bikes in front of local bars and restaurants to increase his store’s visibility. And in a nod to the governor, he’s assembled a mannequin wearing a black leather jacket and jeans in “Terminator” style. The dummy lay in a corner of the shop Thursday, awaiting one final piece.

“That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I haven’t found a head for him yet,” Poulson said. “He’s going to be up on a bike.”

LOCATION: 2210 W. Balboa Blvd., Newport Beach

OPENED: November 2007

SPECIALTIES: Electric bikes, scooters, skateboards, cars and golf carts

CONTACT: (949) 675-5010

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at michael.miller@latimes.com.