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LOS ANGELES — In a move that alarmed environmentalists but failed to placate automakers, staff for the state’s air-quality board proposed Friday to sharply scale back a rule that would put thousands of battery-powered vehicles on California roads by 2003. 

Automakers would instead be allowed to sell more vehicles that use other emission-cutting technologies.  

Examples include the Toyota Prius or Honda Insight – which use both gas and electric motors – or cars that run on natural gas. 

The California Air Resources Board, which directed its staff to draft the revisions in September, will vote on the proposal next month. 

Clean-air advocates complained the change would halt the progress made so far toward making electric cars cheap and available enough to be a feasible option for California drivers. Production must increase if the technology, particularly batteries, is ever going to get cheaper, they argue. 

“What we’re setting up here is a slow death rather than a quick death,” said Tim Carmichael, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Clean Air. 

Automakers have complained the state board’s rules would make them force an expensive technology with low environmental benefits on consumers who don’t want it.  

They say spending millions of dollars on marketing has shown interest in alternative vehicles to be virtually nonexistent. 

California’s zero-emission rules have been a model for much of the country. The rules, which the board revisits every two years, presently require zero-emission vehicles to make up 4 percent of annual sales by 2003.  

An additional 6 percent would have to be cars that fall just short of the zero-emission standard.