“What I am hearing here doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. What you are talking about is a technology that you say is almost ready, and it sounds like the best thing since sliced bread. You have you mentioned that Detroit is on the ropes, they are closing factories, they are laying off people. The American public is demanding cars that stretch their consumer’s dollars longer. So why isn’t the effort here on the part of all of you to do what has always been done in the United States when people have a bright idea that could potentially make billions of dollars, which is to put your own money where your mouth is or at least go out to investors and try to persuade them that your idea is a good idea form your own company and beat the pants off Detroit if Detroit doesn’t get it if in fact this is a good idea? Instead what you’re doing is organizing a political coalition to make Washington change the market place and I really don’t understand that logic at all. I would like some one to explain it to me?”

This sounds like the very question that I posed in my last Blog, titled Manufacturing EVs Part II, posted here at EVWorld. He even uses my comment line to “Put your money where your mouths are.” I hope that this person didn’t get the idea from me.

I want to say that I am in direct opposition to the way the question was posed. I applaud every effort to switch to electric propulsion and electric drive trains. I believe that a concerted effort by all parties involved, private citizens, industry and government, should be put forth and sustained until a flexible fueled plug-in series hybrid becomes a regular purchasable choice for the American consumer. I very much want to be part of making this vehicle a reality and am pushing with all I have to make it a reality. What I have right now, however, is only my voice in my writing, and a small audience of knowledgeable people to preach to and get feedback from. However, I keep writing because I have been a witness to what a small group of people can do. That witness comes from my experience seeing what my father was able to accomplish as a linguist.

My father, Dr. Robert Lado, went to the University of Michigan from the University of Texas to work with a group of professors directed by Dr. Charles Fries in the brand new field of Applied Linguistics. At the U of M, Dr. Fries was experimenting with other possible methods for learning languages away from the method used for centuries, later to be called the “grammar translation method.” If you have ever studied Latin, you probably have experienced this method first hand. I did for Latin and Greek.

This group of about 16 people went on to develop nearly all of the approaches to language learning used to day. When U of M’s management, in there infinite wisdom, decided to deemphasize the program, they scattered to the winds. Theses 16 brains went on to set up leading programs at universities all around the world. My father ended up at Georgetown to make the well known Institute of Languages into a full School of Languages and Linguistics and presided over it as its first Dean. This small group of people had tremendous influence on the field that grew to enormous size. I attended the TESOL convention several years with its thousands upon thousands of participants, later told by its founders that it was started in a basement in Georgetown, bankrolled by my father. Later I attended another huge convention for foreign student advisors and discovered its founding President was a friend of my Dads, whose sister typed my Dad’s papers at the University of Texas. Small groups growing to have enormous influence.

40 years after the program at U of M in essence closed I was talking to an administrator of an English program in Ecuador who proudly touted the schools current recognition by the University of Michigan’s Language Institute, the university still living off the legacy of a small band of professors who changed the face of language learning forever.

For me the responses, stating in essence that the task of starting a flexible fuel plug-in hybrid company is nearly impossible and because the focus of the group is to show very clearly that there is a demand for these types of vehicles, though proper, belies what I know to be true, because I witnessed it. What I witnessed is that a small band of people do have the ability to change the parameters of what is and is not possible.

What I would like to propose is that Plug-In Partners add an exploration study into what it would take to launch an automobile manufacturer that would produce such a vehicle, and to also explore what sort of backing for such a venture might be. If such efforts do anything a study like I propose might lead to greater pressure on the auto industry to produce a plug-in hybrid before significant venture capital creates a new competitor for them to deal with. I would like to be a part of this as well.
Posted by: Joseph Lado