Women buy more cars, so why are the designs so macho? | Hacker News Reader

Women buy more cars, so why are the designs so macho?

wired.com

4 pointskansaswriter13 comments

The makeup mirror in my Prius C doesn’t have a light and every time I flip it open at night and can’t check if my mascara has smeared I do think “Damnit this car was designed by a man.” I had a similar thought this morning when I realized there wasn’t an outlet in the bathroom at the place I’m staying. I ended up blowing my hair dry plugged into a hallway outlet.

Of course the “this was designed by a man” is a short cut to express that there are feature shortfalls bc the designer could not conceive the need for these features…likely bc they don’t need or use those features themselves.

The Prius C didn't have a rear view camera when almost every other car did, right before it became mandatory.

That's a significant part of why I never bought one.

I honestly never thought of that design aesthetic as "macho". I've always thought of it as "angry" and/or "mean".

It was definitely a stretched association. I'm still surprised how far the author ran this article off the rails though:

> Perhaps now, a window is opening to add more women like Christensen to design teams, and to infuse more femininity, or even androgyny, into car design.

> Perhaps, though, it may not always feel that the end result of designing for women resonates with men and women alike, much less the LGBTQIA+ community.

What if I'm just, a normal person? What if I don't want to give you the marketing details of my gender or my sexuality or personal insecurity, and just want a normal car? I get the feeling that tuning current designs towards "androgynous" market demand would just put us back where we are today.

The engineering part of me is so frustrated and sad after reading this. I don't understand where the author is coming from and it feels like an in-joke gone too far.

Yes.

I don't think of more refined/friendly aesthetics as "feminine", either. Maybe I just don't tend to automatically assign gender to design aesthetics.

The author clearly views the world through a different lens than I do. That's actually fair and fine. We all view the world through our own lenses, and each of our lenses distort our view in their own unique ways.

I swear I remember that a woman succeeded Chris Bangle at BMW and the subsequent designs were a lot better looking.

However, when I google it I see that Adrian van Hooydonk came after him.

>an in-joke gone too far

"Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of"

Here's an interesting link:

http://www.bmwism.com/bmws_designers.htm

Juliane Blasi, a "German designer educated at Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences in Design, Technology and Business" says: “If you look at the car you should not be able to see whether it was designed by a woman or a man”

Nadya Arnaout, a "German automotive interior designer educated at Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG – Academy of Art and Design) in Offenbach am Main, Hesse and at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA" designed interiors for BMWs until 2010 when she left to become the "lead interior designer at Tesla Motors".

I can't find anyone on the page who seems to be the design chief whose name I've forgotten. Wikipedia claims the F10 5-series was designed (exterior) by Jacek Fröhlich.

A designer friend says: "it makes other cars move out of the way when you test drive the car during the purchase process."

I'm obviously in the minority, because they keep designing cars this way so people are clearly buying them, but that sort of design strongly negatively affects my inclination to own the car.

I'm not a big "your car should reflect you" sort of person, but I'm not immune to the effect. I know that seeing cars on the road with that aesthetic causes me discomfort and encourages me to make unflattering assumptions about the people driving them, and I don't want to have that effect on others.

Yeah, well, I'm no fan myself, but I can see how it's positive for some people. You go out on the autobahn and other drivers make space for you!

Not a designer myself, but who decides that a design is male or female?

If you want to create a car that appeals to men, it's important that the designer has a very manly name like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_Lagaay. It's practically a hate crime just to say it.

And it's also important that the exterior styling is as macho as can be. That requires it to be sculpted entirely out of voluptuous curves. Like a codpiece.

You can see a bright red example here (Mr. Lagaay's masterpiece was the Carrera GT): https://news.dupontregistry.com/porsche/rubystone-red-porsch...

The last time I looked at car brochures (ca 2005), there was definitely a bimodal distribution. Maybe it was gendered, maybe not, but half of the brochures were full of exterior shots of the car on winding roads, with enough window reflection that nothing interior was visible, and the other half were full of interior shots of the car full of laughing people, with nothing outside the car's windows really visible.

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