丰田汽车:顾客的需求在第一位

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President Obama taking a hard line on fuel economy standards in effort to cut down green house gas emissions and also cut US foreign oil consumption, standing on side of the President, heads of some of the world's top automakers, including Toyota's president of US sales Jim Lentz, joins us now from Washington to discuss quite a day today  for the industry as a whole. Jim, let's talk about the CAFE standards are going into effect, starting in 2012. Toyota has been pushing for an increase in these standards for a while. Would you like to see them enforce sooner than 2012 so that Toyota can hold on to a competitive advantage against US automakers that lack on some fronts in terms of fuel efficiency?

No, I don't think it's a question of advantage. I think it's a question of understanding with certainty where the standards are, so that we can now work on our product plans to try to meet these standards.

Are you impressed with the way the standards that have been set or would you ever like to see a higher starting point seen as we're not even going to hit at the beginning of this till 2012, that'll come into full effect by 2016?

Well, I don't think it's all about just meeting standards. I think first and foremost, as a manufacturer our goal is to meet customer needs. And we have to secondarily ensure that we meet the standards so we will continue to push vehicles like the all new Prius, er, that we will exceed the standards by quite ways but that's because what consumers are asking for in today's market.

Let's talk about the Prius, the all new Pirus as you say released this week, just unveiled this week, the sales goals are really aggressive, roughly 400,000 units a year. That's the goal there but as we see this new CAFE standards set for 2012 competition when you look at hybrids it’s certainly going to increase. Did you factor that in, in the sales goal looking at the Prius?

Yeah, we have. I mean part of it is based on where the overall global market is today. In the US, our goal, first four-year of sale which will be 2010, is about 180,000. As the market continues to recover, I think you will see our numbers go up, but today in this very challenging market, that's probably a fairly reasonable number

When we look at gas prices that's a really critical part of this, because to incent customers to come in and wanna buy these new vehicles with these higher emission standards and get a better fuel economy, you have to also have gas prices that are increasing or in an area where consumers wanna save on gas. When we saw gas prices fall off the $4.11 high that was set over the summer. What did we see, we saw sales of trucks and SUVs pick up, how does Toyota compensate for that?

Well, I think we compensate, that the two things that we know for certain, is right now what drives behavior from consumers is not necessarily the absolute price of gas but it's the rate of change in the price of gas. The second thing that we know for certain is that over time the prices are going to go up as we look into this next decade we know that towards the end of the decade and early into the 2020s, we will see peak oil. When that takes place, we will see an increase in the price of gas and it will never come back. So it's just a matter of time before we have to see these increased CAFE numbers as well as emission numbers.

Glossary

1.       hard line                           n.强硬路线   

2.       fuel economy                      燃料经济

3.       CAFE standards              Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards         美国公司平均燃油经济性标准

4.       go into effect                        生效   

5.       push for                            v.奋力争取

6.       competitive advantage              竞争优势              

7.       fuel efficiency                      n.燃料效率,燃料热值,燃料发热量   

8.       come into effect                    开始生效, 开始实施

9.         emission standards                 排放[发射]标准