angelweave

December 20, 2003

Cars for Women!


Michele at A Small Victory has a post about Volvo (you know - They're Boxy but They're Good) designing a car with women in mind. She says:
    So Volvo got a bunch of their female workers together and had them design a car with women in mind. This prototype will include such innovations as a valley down the center of the headrest for ponytail wearers, and an hood that can only be opened by a mechanic (who is contacted by some wireless thigamajig) because women just hate to be bothered with mechanical maintanence of a car.

    Whatever.
Yeah. Strange, no? Cars are pretty unisex. The actual article says this:
    Volvo hopes the prototype will send a message to female buyers, who have long felt neglected by male designers and disrespected by dealerships.

    Beyond that, Volvo wants to shake up the male-dominated culture inside the company, something found at virtually all automakers. Ultimately, Volvo says, the project might help attract women employees as well as women buyers.
We should make cars for Asians! For people of Hispanic descent! Maybe not. Want to make a car appealing to women? Make it curvy and eye-catching. Oh, wait, that's just making the car appealing to me. How would I know what women want?

Just a bit more...

Model name? The Volva. Groan in unison, please.

hln

Posted by hln at December 20, 2003 11:11 AM | Whimsy | TrackBack
Comments

Groan....

Posted by: Susie at December 20, 2003 11:35 AM

The fact that Volvo's engineering is dominated by men wouldn't have anything to do with the vast majority of engineers being male, do you think? ;)

This reminds me of a project the Army undertook probably 15 years ago, wherein they strongly encouraged female recruits to become mechanics, because they were "under-represented" there.

Basically, within a year or two most of them had transferred into different jobs.

Dogmatic liberalism, which sees ANY difference as evidence of discrimination, ultimately has to destroy free choice in order to get the result it wants.

Who was it that said with the French national motto -- liberty, equality and fraternity -- that you destroy the first when you try to enforce the other two.

Posted by: Discoshaman at December 21, 2003 12:03 AM

I love that you have a "whimsy" section. The bywords of my own blog are "fear and whimsy."

Posted by: Discoshaman at December 21, 2003 12:05 AM

It should be called Dolores.

Posted by: Victor at December 21, 2003 09:05 AM

Just stopped by to second Susie's groan...

Posted by: Harvey at December 21, 2003 01:11 PM

Oh no - triple that Groan!!!

Posted by: Teresa at December 21, 2003 04:49 PM