????另外一種讓我們尤為動心的技術是氫燃料電池技術，它在這個十年內可能還無法實現。但它將是汽車行業的終極目標。

????在您職業生涯早期，最為人們熟知的是您對客戶需求的關注，而不是工程師或其他內部人員的需求。如今，通用汽車是否也充分做到了以消費者為核心？

????還沒有，但我們正在逐步改善。我們最近剛剛任命了一位優秀的女士（艾麗西亞?鮑勒-戴維斯）擔任公司副總裁，負責客戶體驗業務——從汽車行業來看，這是一個全新的任命思路。她在通用汽車工作了10年，曾參與一款核心產品的研發，并負責管理生產該產品的工廠。所以，她在基層擁有很好的口碑。她曾經歷過汽車的設計與制造。對于我們而言，客戶體驗不僅是將汽車建造得更加可靠和耐久，并以質量為導向，還包括汽車設計、生產、銷售的方式以及售后服務。我們將堅持完全以數據為依據，而不是感情用事。通用汽車必將改善市場對我們的認識，對此，我抱有很大的信心。

????您肯定掌握了大量客戶數據，但是，如果貴公司和我采訪過的其他公司一樣，無論這些數據的價值如何，你們并沒有對這些數據加以利用。這點是否合理？

????事實上，我們非常重視公司的IT系統。之前，客戶信息數據倉儲并不是公司的優勢，甚至完全沒有過，但未來我們肯定會有。

????目前，美國財政部仍持有通用汽車26%的股份。這是否會阻礙公司的發展？

????從某些方面說是這樣的，但也不盡然。近期的一份調查顯示，部分人表示，只要政府持有公司股份，他們就不會購買通用汽車的車。我認為，相當一部分買車的人持有的還是強烈的自由市場經濟觀點。我也不例外。

????但如果通用汽車和克萊斯勒（Chrysler）倒閉，很大一部分供應鏈必然會崩潰。制造商、博格華納（BorgWarner）、德爾福公司（Delphi）、偉世通公司（Visteon）等供應鏈各方，以及代理商，雇傭的總人數達到了800萬人。這意味著，一旦通用汽車和克萊斯勒倒閉，每年將危及5,000億美元的工資和700億美元的稅收。此外，還要考慮它給社會造成的破壞：人們流離失所，孩子失去進入大學深造的機會等等。一個人一輩子總要為自己的人民做點什么。我們的兩屆政府都具有非凡的勇氣和領導能力勇敢地站出來。不論是重組還是破產，都會有許多種解決途徑。而我們選擇了正確的道路。

????您曾經想過自己有一天會成為通用汽車的CEO嗎？

????從沒有想過。

????And then there's one we feel strongly about, which probably won't happen in this decade, and that's hydrogen fuel-cell technology. It's kind of the nirvana of where this eventually goes.

????You were well known in earlier careers for being highly focused on what matters to customers vs. what may matter to engineers or other insiders. Is GM sufficiently customer-centric today?

????Not yet, but we're getting better. We just named a very talented young woman [Alicia Boler-Davis] vice president of customer experience -- that's a new kind of perspective from an automotive point of view. She's been with us about 10 years, helped develop one of our key products, and managed a plant that produced it. So she's got street cred. She's seen the vehicle designed and built. For us the customer experience is not only making the vehicle reliable and durable and quality-oriented, but also how it was designed, manufactured, sold, and the post-sale. We're going to be very, very data-driven rather than episodically driven. I hold great hopes for the improvement of how we're perceived in the marketplace.

????You must have a tremendous amount of customer data, but if you're like many companies I talk to, you haven't been using it for all it's worth. Is that fair?

????We're looking at our IT systems real hard. Data warehousing of customer information was not a strength in the company. Maybe it wasn't even existent, but it will be in the future.

????The U.S. Treasury still owns 26% of GM. Is that an impediment to the company's performance?

????Yes and no. A recent survey showed there's a percentage of people who say that as long as the company has government ownership, they'll not buy a car from General Motors. I think there's a certain percentage of the buying public that has a very free-market perspective on the economy. I do too.

????But had General Motors and Chrysler gone down, it's reasonable to say that a good part of the supply chain would have collapsed. The manufacturers, the supply-chain folks like BorgWarner, Delphi, Visteon, and others, plus the dealerships employ 8 million people. That represents $500 billion a year in payroll and $70 billion in taxes that would have been at risk. And the social destruction -- people losing their homes, children not being able to go to college -- every once in a while you have to do something for your citizens. Two administrations had the courage and the leadership to stand up. Whenever there's a restructuring or a bankruptcy, there are multiple paths to resolution. We took the right path.

????Did you ever think you'd be CEO of General Motors?

????Never.