汽车的未来(1)
10. The Future of Cars
10. 汽车的未来
The fact is, when we do our market research around the world, we see that there’s nearly a universal aspiration on the part of people to own an automobile. And 750 million people in the world today own a car. And you say, boy, that’s a lot. But you know what? That’s just 12 percent of the population. We really have to ask the question: Can the world sustain that number of automobiles? And if you look at projections over the next 10 to 15 to 20 years, it looks like the world car park could grow to on the order of 1.1 billion vehicles. Now, if you Parked those end to end and wrapped them around the Earth; that would stretch around the Earth 125 times.
实际上，我们在做世界范围的市场调研时，发现人们都是对车充满渴望的。现在全球有7亿5千万人拥有汽车。你可能觉得，哇，这么多!但你们知道么?这个数字仅仅占全球人口的12%。我们不得不问这样一个问题：地球能承受得了这么多车么?如果你注意到对未来10年、15年至20年的预测，你会发现世界上停车场的数量将会增长到能容纳下11亿车辆。如果将这些车首尾相连绕地球停放，那么其长度将是地球周长的125倍。
Now, we’ve made great progress with automobile technology over the last 100 years. Cars are dramatically cleaner, dramatically safer, more efficient and radically more affordable than they were 100 years ago. But the fact remains: the fundamental DNA of the automobile has stayed pretty much the same. If we are going to reinvent the automobile today, rather than 100 years ago, knowing what we know about the issues associated with our product and about the technologies that exist today, what would we do?
在过去的100年里，汽车技术飞速发展。汽车变得更加清洁、安全、高效，而且价格更加低廉，而不是让我们望而兴叹的东西。但实际上，汽车的基本构造功能没变。如果我们今天来重新发明汽车，而不是在100年前，在已经知道汽车的各种缺陷之后，结合现在的各种先进技术，我们会如何制造汽车？
What we’ve targeted for ourselves–and we’re making great progress for this goal–is to have a propulsion system based on hydrogen and fuel cells, designed and validated, that can go head-to-head with the internal combustion engine.
我们的目标是制造一个以氢燃料电池为基础的推进系统，这个目标正在进展中并且不断得到改进。经过设计及验证后，这个推进系统将能与内燃机媲美。