Women And Cars: What You Should Know In 2023 And Beyond

We’re on the precipice of a new era for luxury automotive brands. With the 2030 proposals for only electric-motored vehicles to go into production, companies that have traditionally focussed on powerful combustion engines are facing a conundrum: pivot, or perish.

Where economical automotive brands - producing ‘everyday’ cars - are finding it relatively easy to switch to hybrid or electric iterations of their popular models, sports and performance car brands have a bigger challenge. In ranks where horsepower talks and people wear petrol fumes like perfume, electric is a harder sell. To win in a tricky market, luxury brands like Lotus, McLaren, Aston Martin and so on, will have to find ways to pack all the performance and thrill of a lithe, V12, mid-engine machine, into their new battery-exclusive future. The race is now on to make electric vehicles sexy, and not only that, to make electric performance vehicles appealing to a newer market segment: women.

For Lotus, whose legend was founded on incredible little two-seater sports cars like Elise and Exige, this is a concept the brand understands acutely. Lotus knows that for their survival, they need to make electric cars cool and they need to open their arms to the hordes of profoundly successful professional women who are looking to spend their sizeable disposable income on something a little exciting.

One of the first (and the smartest, if you ask me) ways that Lotus is doing this, is hiring female executives at the top level, like Mel King, Marketing & Communications Manager, Lotus Cars and Victoria Tomlinson, Executive Director, Global PR and Communications, who had this to say of the brand’s future plans:

‘Lotus has traditionally been a British sports car brand, and over the past year or so, it has been transforming into a global luxury technology brand.

We’ve launched lifestyle electric vehicles including our hyper-SUV, Eletre, as well as recently launched hyper-GT, Emeya. The ambition is to sell 150k cars from 2028 onwards, and to do so, we need to engage with new audiences.

The feedback we often get from women who come to our press events is that they are always the minority, and the way brands talk to women about EVs can often be patronising. We want to change that. That’s why we put on an all-female press event. Lotus as a brand has always been for the drivers. So, we wanted to create a space and experience focusing on the performance of Eletre and demonstrating that driving an EV can be exciting and fun. The feedback we have received from the event was incredibly positive. We can’t wait to do more just like it and continue to show that women are interested in performance EVs.’

When it comes to marketing cars to women, we’ve come to expect two distinct approaches: entry level (‘easy to drive’) vehicles and family SUVs. For all that these might be the types of cars most commonly purchased by female customers, it does paint a rather depressing picture for the future of women on the road. The implication, of course, is that women aren’t great drivers or that our sole purpose is to reproduce and then ferry children backwards and forwards.

Consider this: women now hold over 40% of board-level positions in British organisations. And you know what that means? It means we are making the big bucks. And with disposable incomes among women at an all-time high, at least in the UK, there’s huge potential for women to reward their ever mounting career milestones with celebratory purchases that don’t include Gucci bags or spa days. If only we were marketing sports cars to women… imagine what might start to happen.

The surprising news is that one of the better strides into marketing fast cars to women comes from one of the most reputationally ‘boy racer’ brands in Britain: McLaren. Their ‘Women at the Wheel’ days invite female drivers to head down to race tracks to sample some of the best and most exciting car models that McLaren has to offer in a setting that allows them to let rip. Most recently, they held a ‘Women at the Wheel’ event to showcase the Artura, pairing each female driver with a professional race coach, to spend the day shaving seconds off their lap-times and learn more efficient racing lines through corners. What might just sound like a fun afternoon is really a vote of confidence in and respect for women driving performance cars.

According to a McLaren spokesperson: ‘Our aim is to be as open and inclusive as possible. We already have many female customers and brand enthusiasts who love to share in the thrill of driving a McLaren on road or track. We created Women at the Wheel to demonstrate the fun and excitement of our brand to a wider audience.

‘Within McLaren, we maintain a number of programs designed to mentor young women and support career progression through the industry. Our STEM ambassador program centres around mentoring young women and engaging with schools and other academic institutions in order to break down stigmas, excite people about the automotive industry, and highlight the many diverse and varied career opportunities that exist within our business.’

Jeep’s launch of the Avenger model cements the brand’s place within a movement of EV-focussed automotive companies looking to break free of tired marketing tactics. Proactively going after a market segment that is younger, broader and full of women, the fully electric Avenger compact SUV harnesses all of the fun, adventure-filled, off-road capabilities so recognisable as Jeep’s DNA, but distilled down into a cute, compact little body with loads of little thoughtful touches. The genius here is a recognition of what so many of us urbanite young women and men began feeling during the pandemic - that the walls were closing in around us in the city and that being confined to grid system roads felt suffocating, even if city-living (and the cars that cater for it) are necessary for our lives.

And so they’ve designed an SUV that can do it all. About as compact as it gets, this relatively tiny 4 metre car is nifty enough to parallel park in congested streets, nip through rush hour traffic and breeze through single file roads, and yet, determined to concentrate down all the promise of a Wrangler into it’s petite body, Jeep have managed to include all the capabilities you might need for an experience-filled weekend staycation too. It’s got 20cm of ground clearance, the sort of boot space that will allow you to chuck in some tents, a bike, a buggy or some camping chairs, plus a rubber mat insert to prevent these things sliding around in tough conditions. What’s more, it’s got different driving modes to navigate heavy mud, sand or even snow. Basically, it’s a serious all-rounder.

It’s a car that feels like it was designed both joyfully and realistically, for the real lives of urban professionals who are trying to juggle the work-life balance daily. It doesn’t sell you a dream, but it does let you feel like your ambitions to have a break from city life are actually possible.

This isn’t so much a direct review of a car brand’s approach to women, but make no mistake about it, the more we see women represented in competitive motorsports, the more that collective consciousness will shift around women driving for pleasure or performance. Which means, companies that invest in female car race competitors will have a direct impact on the way women buy cars in the future. Fact.

Aston Martin announcing Jessica Hawkins - a competitive racing driver - as their F1 test driver, and putting her in the AMR21 on the track in Hungary, is a bold and brilliant move. It’s great marketing for them, sure, as the news of a woman on the F1 track for the first time in years has made countless headlines, but it’s also a pledge to cement the relationship between women and sports cars in the future. And for that, we have to hand it to them.

Though this is the recent news, a bigger and more longterm pledge of both support and, crucially, investment, has come at the hands of Spanish businessman and financier Alejandro Agag. Agag is responsible for the famous Formula E championship, but more recently launched the all-electric off-road car racing series Extreme E, which sees world class competitive racing drivers face off in Mad Max-style 4-wheel beasts, on rough terrain tracks that involve jumps as well as splash zones, plus trees, bushes, lizards and other obstacles to avoid.

Crucially, Agag’s Extreme E championship was the first to mandate a female driver for every single team, to partner with a male team mate and with each receiving equal drive time, incorporating a car switch between the drivers during every race. The beauty of this investment is already starting to show through - with the men and women competing together, and with the fastest lap records split pretty evenly between the genders, it’s becoming increasingly plain to see that when you offer women the same access, the same team support and the same investment, they are just as skilled, as competitive, and as masterful as the men they’re pitching against. More Than Equal might have issued the rally cry (more on this here), but on the Extreme E campus, the proof is in the pudding.

When you conjure up images of Rolls-Royce, it's not a two-seater roadster that most comes to mind. Famed for the sort of enormous, stately cars more suited to being chauffeured around at a leisurely pace, than working up speed with the roof down, sports cars aren't usually the association. And yet here we are...

The next iteration of Rolls-Royce's 'Coachbuild' arm - which sees extremely exclusive, bespoke car designs come to life for only the most privileged of Rolls-Royce customers - Droptail 'La Rose Noire' was imagined with elegance and femininity in mind, as evidenced by the petal parquet dashboard, the sleek 'sail cowls' streamlining the rear, the repositioning of the RR 'badge of honour' insignia for cleaner lines and a cantilevered elliptical armrest which is soft, pillowy and inviting.

Nipping at the heels of other purely electric automotive brands, Volvo-owned Polestar is making enormous strides and with a marketing strategy that includes both women and also those at the forefront of sustainability campaigning, it's clear that this is a brand hoping to do things a little bit differently.

This year, Polestar launched Polestar 3, which they've dubbed 'the SUV for the electric age'. And it's really something worth paying attention to. With cool, minimalist Scandi styling, a range that you can really write home about (379 miles) and technology that's both user-friendly and safe, this is an electric SUV that's bound to appeal en masse.