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People love their automobiles. They allow us to go where we want to when we want to. They're a form of entertainment, they're a form of art, a pride of ownership. Songs are written about cars. Prince wrote a great song: "Little Red Corvette." He didn't write "Little Red Laptop Computer" or "Little Red Dirt Devil." He wrote about a car. And one of my favorites has always been, "Make love to your man in a Chevy van," because that was my vehicle when I was in college.
人人都爱车。有了车，我们就能随时随地前往我们想去的地方。车是一种娱乐形式，是一种艺术形式，是一种拥有的骄傲。有许多关于汽车的歌曲。王子（Prince）写了一首很棒的《小小红色雪佛兰》。他写的不是《小小红色笔记本电脑》，也不是《小小红色吸尘器》，而是关于一辆车的歌曲。我最喜欢的一首是《在雪佛兰里做爱吧》，因为雪佛兰是我大学时期的座驾。
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，当我们在做世界范围的市场调研时，发现人们对拥有一辆车都是充满渴望的。现在全球有7.5亿人拥有汽车。你可能说，哇，这么多。但你们知道么？这个数字仅仅是全球人口的12%。我们真的不得不产生这样的疑问：地球经受得了这么多车么？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几乎11亿辆车。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，汽车技术取得了很大进步。汽车变得更加清洁、安全、髙效。比起100年前，现在汽车已成为大众消费品，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并没有多大改变。如果我们不是在100年前，而是在今天来重新发明汽车，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？
