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10. The Future of Cars
10. 汽車的未來
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.
實際上，我們在做世界范圍的市場調研時，發(fā)現(xiàn)人們都是對車充滿渴望的。現(xiàn)在全球有7億5千萬人擁有汽車。你可能覺得，哇，這么多!但你們知道么?這個數字僅僅占全球人口的12%。我們不得不問這樣一個問題：地球能承受得了這么多車么?如果你注意到對未來10年、15年至20年的預測，你會發(fā)現(xiàn)世界上停車場的數量將會增長到能容納下11億車輛。如果將這些車首尾相連繞地球停放，那么其長度將是地球周長的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?
在過去的100年里，汽車技術飛速發(fā)展。汽車變得更加清潔、安全、高效，而且價格更加低廉，而不是讓我們望而興嘆的東西。但實際上，汽車的基本構造功能沒變。如果我們今天來重新發(fā)明汽車，而不是在100年前，在已經知道汽車的各種缺陷之后，結合現(xiàn)在的各種先進技術，我們會如何制造汽車？
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.
我們的目標是制造一個以氫燃料電池為基礎的推進系統(tǒng)，這個目標正在進展中并且不斷得到改進。經過設計及驗證后，這個推進系統(tǒng)將能與內燃機媲美。
