经典名人英语演讲稿48：汽车的未来（通用汽车研发部副总裁拉里.伯恩斯2005年TED大会演讲） mp3
48. The Future of Cars
48. 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 sane. 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--we're talking about obsoleting the internal combustion engine--and do it in terms of its affordability, add skill volumes, its performance and its durability. So that's what we're driving to for 2010. We haven't seen anything yet in our development work that says that isn't possible. We actually think the future's going to be event-driven. So since we can't predict the future, we want to spend a lot of our time trying to create that future.
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。我们打算淘汰内燃机，并在提高可购性，增加技能，提高性能和耐用性方面努力。这就是2010年我们要傲的工作。目前还没发现在研发过程中有任何迹象表明我们的想法不可行。我们相信未来将成为具体事件的导向。虽然我们无法预测未来，所以我们会努力花时间去创造未来。
I'm very, very intrigued by the fact that our cars and trucks sit idle 90 percent of the time: they're parked, they Parked all around us. They're usually parked within 100 feet of the people that own them. Now, if you take the power-generating capability of an automobile and you compare that to the electric grid in the United States, it turns out that 4 percent of the automobiles, the power in 4 percent of the automobiles, equals that of the electric grid of the U.S. That's a huge power-generating capability, a mobile power-generating capability. And hydrogen and fuel cells give us that opportunity to actually use our cars and trucks when they're parked to generate electricity for the grid.
我们的汽车以及卡车有90%的时间是停放着的，我对如何挖掘这段时间内车子的潜能很感兴趣。这些车就停在我们周围，停在距离他们的所有者不到100英尺的范围内。比较汽车和美国电网的发电能力，汽车电力的四分之一相当于美国电网的供电能力。所以由此可看出汽车发电能力的强大，而且还是可移动的发电。氢燃料电池让我们能够充分利用资源，即使汽车和卡车停着的时候也能发电，为电网所用。
And the key to all of this is to make it affordable, to make it exciting, to get it on a pathway where there's a way to make money doing it. And again, this is a pretty big march to take here. And a lot of people say: how do you sleep at night when you're rustling with a problem of that magnitude? And I tell them I sleep like a baby: I wake up crying every two hours. Actually the theme of this conference, I think, has hit on really one of the major keys to pull that off--and that's relationships and working together. Thank you very much. (Applause).
但最重要的是我们要让汽车物美价廉，变得令人兴奋，并且有足够的资金进行研发。要实现我们的设想还有很长的路要走。许多人担心，如果考虑这样一个巨大的工程，晚上怎么睡得肴。我告诉他们我睡觉时就像小婴儿一样，每两个小时就醒来哭一次。我认为这次研讨会的主题，实际上就是策划出关键要素，并予以实现。那就是关系网的建立与相互合作。谢谢（掌声）。
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