whe Cars Fly 如果汽车会飞.docVIP

whe Cars Fly 如果汽车会飞 　　The automobile has long been a symbol of everything great and everything terrible about America. On the one hand： freedom， individualism， power， speed. The taming of millions of miles of varied wildernesses through roads， then highways， then interstates. The capacity of American industry―Pittsburgh’s steel， Akron’s rubber， Detroit’s factories. 　　But on the other hand： gas-guzzling1） SUVs. Traffic and sprawl. The abandonment of mass transit. The decline of the Rust Belt2）， the near-collapse of the Big Three automakers3） during the Great Recession of 2008， and the slow death of American manufacturing and blue-collar work. 　　Now， after four decades of doldrums4）， things are looking up5） for American carmakers， in ways that would have been hard to imagine just 10 years ago. Yet the changes ahead won’t reconcile the great and the terrible of the past； instead， the conflicts between freedom and community， power and equity， will play out in new ways. Here’s what that future will look like. 1. Baby Steps Toward Autonomy … 　　Google， Tesla， and Uber―companies that didn’t even exist when Toyota introduced the Prius， in 1997―have become major players in the auto industry. Both Google and Tesla aim to introduce fully autonomous cars―that is， cars that drive themselves―within the next several years， and Uber recently founded an RD center in Pittsburgh with an eye toward6） ushering in our driverless future. 　　Self-driving cars are expected to be much safer than human-driven ones. But even if the first robot cars hit the roads in the next few years， most of us probably won’t give up driving entirely for at least another 15 or 20 years. In the meantime， traditional cars will gradually take over certain aspects of driving. 　　Companies have been adding semiautonomous features to cars since the 1990s―things like adaptive cruise control， which uses sensors to adjust a car’s speed based on the traffic in front of it， and automated parallel parking. Some ca