Everthing Women Always Wanted to Know About Cars: But Didn't Know Who to Ask - Lesley Hazleton - Paperback - 1st ed

I remember everything about the day I bought my firstcar. The pride, the awe at the financial responsibility, the way I stroked the paintwork. It was the cheapest car on the market -- a CitroUn 2CV -- and I loved that car with an intensity that still persists, years later. It was simple, it was basic, and it always, always worked. And even after all the fancy cars I've driven since then, if you gave me half a chance -- and if they still made that car -- I'd buy it again. I remember that day so clearly because while men take for granted the independence that cars bring, women do not. Our own car means freedom. It means control of our own lives. It means, in short, far more to us than it does to most men. Yet for years, automakers thought of women as the poor relations of the car world. We were a "niche market," not half the population. So far as they were concerned, women were in the bleachers, men in the grandstands. Not anymore. Women now buy nearly half the cars in the United States (48 percent, to be precise). That's close to sixteen million cars a year, eight million of them new and eight million used. So what we think about cars and what we know about them is suddenly of prime importance. In Detroit, in Japan, in Europe, automakers are trying to figure out "what women want." They could try listening. Women talking about cars is something else altogether. Men may talk about them more, but women have a lot more fun doing it. I discovered just how much fun when I ran a series of focus groups in six states and one Canadian province, with a total of 150 women of all ages, incomes, and ethnic backgrounds. Some drove spanking new cars, some lovingly kept-up vintage cars, some beat-up old clunkers. Often, the smaller and older the car, the more women were attached to it. These women were dynamite. They were both savvy and frustrated, forthright and funny. Each group began with the questionnaire reprinted on page 277, and lasted up to three hours. And those three hours were in turn riotous and intimate, humorous and touching, raucous and revealing. They were evenings of shared memories, intimacies, calamities, insults, high points, low points, dreams, fantasies, and information. We talked sex, relationships, our lives, and yet we were still talking cars. I have spent hours on end talking with men about cars since I became an automotive journalist in the late eighties, but I have never had such fun doing it as in these groups. As a result, this book was written by 151 women -- myself, and the 150 women in the focus groups, who speak in direct quotes throughout these pages. Women talk differently about cars than men. Since we come newer to cars -- we've only started buying cars in proportion to our numbers in the last two decades -- we come without all the clutter of what we're supposed to say about them. We come with requirements of quality that apparently never occurred to men until women started demanding them. We come with fresh eyes and fresh hearts. Here are the main differences. They don't apply to all women or to all men, of course, but they do represent a very distinct trend. Women see cars as an integral part of their lives focus on reliability are honest and forthright when they talk about cars know more about cars than they think are serious about cars but also have a sense of humor about them are more pragmatic about cars think of cars in terms of a relationship (which might be why they have a sense of humor about them) talk cars by their experience in them: what happened in and around them, people and places take great pride in ownership see cars as symbols of freedom and independence Men see cars as machines focus on power feel they have to pretend to know all about cars know less about cars than they think are too serious about cars, can't aHazleton, Lesley is the author of 'Everthing Women Always Wanted to Know About Cars: But Didn't Know Who to Ask - Lesley Hazleton - Paperback - 1st ed' with ISBN 9780385476218 and ISBN 0385476213.