Does the world need more women car designers?
To date, only a handful of women have been the major car designers. John Krsteski, a car design instructor, said he was seeing more women interested in the field. “We’ve gone from one in 15 students being female to having two or three each year,” he said. But still, women in the car-design world are often relegated to automotive interiors, not the sexy exteriors that can represent a brand for decades.
”There are some women in design- but the plum jobs. The exterior is still designed almost entirely by men,” said Tara Weingarten, a longtime automotive journalist and founder of vroomgirls.com, a website for female drivers.
This is a problem that Volvo had attempted to face with its YCC (Your Car Concept) campaign, as women make up more than 50% of its clientele. This was a car designed for women by a team made up of females only. The car had no hood and had customized seats and storage for female drivers. Lena Ekelhund, the deputy project manager of YCC said, ”We have retained our focus on customer needs, not compromised it in favour of flashy technical solutions”.
The redesigned BMW Z4, introduced in 2008 and still in production, remains an automotive rarity, a car designed by two women. Its interior was designed by Nadya Arnaout and its sculptured exterior by Juliane Blasi.
A design manager at Hyundai Design said, “Women bring another level of attention to detail and the complexity of colours. A lot of the male designers focus on the big picture but not the finer detail development, while a lot of the female designers I’ve had enjoy working it out to the very last stitch.”
It’s not the 1950’s anymore. Women buy their own cars and in the family they have the overall influence of car-buying. Women want different things out of cars than men. In one of our previous articles concentrating on tips for buying a car, it was evident that women go about buying cars very differently to men. There are of course cars designed with an eye on women’s needs, but still by men. We can ask if this is enough or if women need to be empowered in the car-design world.
(Sources: NY Times and Road and Travel Magazine)