万花筒 2011-04-01&04-03 未来汽车

 You know, driving in New York city can be a  heroin experience. Boldly run the streets of Manhattan or the suburbs of Atlanta, new technologies both enhance your car and power it are popping up everywhere. Recently, we got a chance to take some of them for a test drive. 

 
Car technology is no longer just GPS maps and satellite radio, it sets your cars like an office or living room on wheels. And that's not to mention the innovations under the hood 1 as well as in the dash. 
 
These days a dashboard in a car looks a little bit like the dash in a cockpit. I mean...
 
Yes, sure it does. 
 
Where we are going with that is to help all of us, not only drive safely and efficiently 2, but also to allow us to be better drivers. 
 
Before taking the wheel of Ford 3, Alan Mulally was CEO at Boeing. So the plane-car comparison is pretty appropriate. How important is it for Ford to appear as a high tech car company?
 
We are a technology company and since Henry Ford set up Ford, everything we do is about bringing and enabling technology and innovation and making that useful to make people's life better, safer and more efficient. 
 
Ford has push its think and mindful touch ways of interacting with the vehicles, which also means using some of the apps on your smart phone well in the car. 
 
How seamless do you want to be here? Drive out the car you are connected, you get in the car, you are connected. I think that what we want to do is to enhance the drivers and use we are really good at. If you organize the information and you do it in a way that's natural forced, that's why we adopted the consumer electronics approach for the command control. 
 
But the debate continues. 
 
Please say a command. 
 
Whether this technology service is beneficial or detrimental 4.
 
We are in connected to what...There are connected devices, people have their mobile phones, they also have music applies, they will bring them into their vehicle. So at Ford, we consider ourselves as part of the solution. And part of the solution for us means now you bring usage of those devices in a safe way. 
 
Meanwhile, companies like Q&X are working with car makers 5 like BMW to tailor the looking feel of the inside of a vehicle. We got a virtual test ride at a recent trade.  
 
The way BMW has implemented 6 the Q&X implementation 7, they used (a political code port called MX Jacksy' profile??)and essentially 8 the invent allows for your entire blackberry emails, text messages, calendar, reminders 9, tasks to be viewed...
 
Read out to you?
 
As read out to you. 
 
This is essentially what is the, you know, traditional engine display in the car. But what we are trying to show case is that there is a ton of different things you can now do with this. You take that application that's running on the device, you think the car friendly, look and feel on the actual display service.
 
So it is easy to use without line and stretch. 
 
Exactly. 
 
And then on electric vehicles coming on to the road. Well, some are mostly electric. The Chevy Volt 10 is neither a hybrid 11 nor a truly solely 12 electric vehicle. And that's because there is also a gas engine. So Chevy is calling it an extended range electric vehicle and that's exactly what it does. Basically, the electric mode will work for about 50 miles or so and after that point the gas engine is designed to kick in and give you a lot more miles. Like every other electric vehicle, it's quiet, it's very smooth ride, it's actually a pretty fun ride. Now the readouts on the displays here there is some tacky stuff going on, you can see how much of the battery is left; you can see whether you are an efficient driver; if you're pushing too much in the accelerator or if you are using up too much of the battery. Now all of these are not gonna come cheap by the way, the manufacturer suggested retail 13 price for the Chevy Volt is about $41,000, which is definitely more than some of the electric vehicles out there on the market. You do get about $7000 federal tax credit because of the clean energy component 14 of this car. But still left about $33,000 since the investment for people and you have to hope you get it back while have seen that spending as much on gas. Every type of clean energy vehicle you can imagine is coming out these days. It's a real trend for cars. Going forward, we'll have to see what lies down the road.