Volvo’s Car By Women, For Women Was Really By Women, For Everyone

It probably won’t come as a surprise that the car industry’s attempts to design cars specifically for women have been… interesting. And not in a good way.

In the 1950s, for instance, Dodge decided to produce a special version of its Custom Royal Lancer aimed specifically at women. Called the La Femme, it was exactly what you’d imagine a group of male auto executives in the ’50s would assume women wanted: namely, lots of pink outside and some floral patterns inside. It was not a success.

More recent examples, from a time when car companies really should have known better, include the Fiat Panda Mamy (designed not just for women, but specifically mothers), and the Japanese-market Honda Fit She’s. Both committed the same faux pas as Dodge had half a century earlier: make it a quote-unquote feminine colour, say it’s for women, job done.

See, the fundamental problem with trying to design cars for women is that cars are, well… cars. Like basically any other consumer product, they’re designed to do a job. If someone wants a practical family car, they’ll buy a practical family car. If someone wants a sports car, they’ll buy a sports car. At no point does the buyer’s gender enter the equation.

Trying to make a ‘car for women’ by painting it pink and filling it with pretty patterns is as patronising and short-sighted as trying to make a car for men that runs on lager and comes with a boot full of raw T-bone steak.

Still, if someone absolutely insisted on designing a car for women, surely it’d make sense for the bulk of the design to be done by… well, women? That was just what Volvo did in 2004. The company had clocked that over half of its US buyers were now women, so it enlisted a team of female employees to lead the decision-making process on a concept that would: the YCC, or Your Concept Car.

Certainly, there wasn’t much cringe-inducing pandering on the surface. The YCC wasn’t pink or purple, but a sleek bronzey-silver. It wasn’t the family-friendly hatchback or SUV you might have imagined, but a low-slung, gullwing-doored coupe powered by one of Volvo’s rorty 2.5-litre five-cylinder engines, integrated into a 215bhp hybrid system. Sounds great.

It had interchangeable seat fabrics, special easy-clean paint and lots of interior storage. Good all-round visibility was made a priority. All of this sounds pretty appealing from a male point of view, too.

The features Volvo’s press release said weren’t often present in male-designed cars weren’t openly offensive: it had cubby holes for handbags and big door apertures for easily loading large items like children. On purchase, a body scan of the driver would be made, allowing the car to recommend the ideal seating position.

Spotted a theme here? Those handbag cubbies could easily be used for storing other things, and it was entirely possible that men might be loading children into the car too, because it was 2004, not 1954. And who hasn’t struggled to get their seating position in a car inch-perfect? In conceiving a car designed by women, for women, Volvo actually created a car for everyone that happened to have been designed by women.

To be fair, this was made fairly clear by Volvo at the time. The company’s then-CEO, Hans-Olov Olsson, said of the YCC: “”This is a fantastic opportunity for us: we can concentrate on the fast-growing group of women customers – without losing the men. Because I’m certain that our male customers will love this concept car.”

Not everything about it was praised at the time: its dent-resistant bumpers, and the fact that the bonnet couldn’t be opened, the car instead automatically booking itself in for a service when the time came, were seen by some commentators as not overly flattering towards women’s driving and mechanical abilities. Again, though, we’d wager there are just as many men out there who skimp on car maintenance and are prone to the odd car park shunt. Had the YCC not been wrapped up in its female-first narrative, these would have been non-issues.

Perhaps the biggest impact of the YCC was the way it highlighted a group of female employees working in an otherwise male-dominated industry. The balance has been gradually shifting, but it’s something the automotive and motorsport industries continue to grapple with today.

Ultimately, though, YCC’s brief fundamentally exposed the flaws in trying to design a car for a specific gender, which is why the narrative was soon changed to make it a car for ‘modern people’. Because that’s who cars are designed for – people.