汽车工程师向我们证明:氢能动力运用在轿车中有完美表现。
Gareth: Bring a load of designers from car companies together and they like nothing better than looking under each other's 9)bonnets, especially when the kit within is still so novel. One of those “10)kicking the tires”,to use an industry phrase I've only just learned, is Sabina Flantz. She's an engineer at Ford.
Sabina: The fuel cell is not under the 11)hood. The fuel cell sits underneath the driver and the passenger seat. And then there's another box with 12)accessories: its compressor, its
13)valves, its knockouts, its all that stuff that makes the fuel cell happy. That's behind the rear seat bank.
Gareth: And because there is less to look at, and there are certainly fewer moving parts, does that mean there's less to go wrong?
Sabina: We can say that these cars have been more reliable than we've ever thought that they would be. So those cars are designed for three years of a lifetime. A regular car is still designed for ten years of a lifetime, so those were the cars they built in 2004 designed for three years and we're beyond this. And we can still have them in the field because they're better than we expected. Now, are they comparable to the regular combustion engines? Not quite. We're not quite there. But think about the past 100 years that we spent to 14)refine the 15)combustion engine car. In the past ten years that we've been using those (that) type of cars...
格瑞斯: 把各大汽车厂商的设计师请来集聚一堂,他们最喜欢的就是揭开别人的车头盖往里审视,尤其是当那套发动设备还那么新的时候。其中一位来“踢车胎”的——套用一句我刚学到的行话——是福特汽车的工程师莎宾娜·弗兰兹。
莎宾娜: 燃料电池并不在车头引擎盖下,而是设在司机及乘客座椅下。另外还有一个内有空气压缩机、阀门、分离器等辅助燃料电池正常运作的配件箱,安装在后座储存室后面。
格瑞斯: 既然要看的东西没那么多,运动机件当然也少了,那是否意味着问题也随之变少?
莎宾娜: 我们可以说这种(使用燃料电池的)汽车比我们当初想象的要更可靠实用。那些车的使用寿命设计是三年,而一部普通汽车设计的使用寿命依然是十年。那些是2004年制造的车,本来设计只能用三年,而现在我们已经超越了这个年限。到目前我们还在用那些车是因为它们的表现超乎了我们的预期。那现在它们的性能可以比得上常规的内燃机驱动汽车吗?还不怎么行。我们还没达到那个水平。但要想想,过去一百年我们一直在发展完善内燃机驱动汽车的制造工艺及性能,那类汽车是我们过去十年间都还在一直使用的……