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What women really want
The Your Concept Car (YCC) has been built on a modest budget of £2m by a team of nine women, none of whom had worked on a concept car before. They include an engineer who is also a mother of three, an interior designer whose background is in home wares and a team leader of 27 called Anna Rosen, who graduated from design school only three years ago.
“Designing the YCC is a dream come true,” says Rosen at a pre-launch meeting at Volvo headquarters in Sweden. “The first time I saw the car in clay form, my heart just raced. I am very proud of what we have created.”
She’s not alone. The project has met with the approval of Hans-Olov Olsson, president of Volvo. “Initially I think the team faced a lot of resistance,” he says. “People were asking ‘Will they be able?’, ‘Will this work?’ But they have more than proved themselves.”
The car itself is stunning: muscular and catlike, with 225bhp on tap. It is as sexy and seductive as any new sports coupé should be, with gullwing doors and a futuristic feel. But it’s the interior that points to its genesis: it is swimming with tactile, eye-friendly textures, from the sea anemone carpets to the oak-panelled console and the changeable seat pads.
The dash is voluptuous and packed with voice-activated media. In the back are two fold-down theatre seats replacing the rear bench — ideal for stowage, though not at first glance suggesting a “family” car. Volvo admits that this car is for the young urban woman on her way to the coffee shop to network, rather than the local school to pick up the kids. She must have a career too: the estimated price is £35,000.
The YCC boasts a glass roof and graduated yellow-to-red brake lights. Sparkly optic fibres line the ceiling for that starry, starry night effect as you glide home at the end of the day, while the doors are voice-activated and a sill folds down to aid access.
Gender-savvy marketing is the current buzz, and when you compare the YCC with the teutonic masculinity of BMW or the old-boy feel of Jaguar, Volvo does seem to be forging ahead rather nicely.
According to Olsson, the YCC is no gimmick, but the first step in a concerted drive to allow women to have more influence within his company and the car industry.
“Shifting the balance of gender is something I’m very much behind, but it’s not something we are going to achieve with one car,” he says. So what does he hope to achieve with the YCC? “My main hope would be that a girl of 16 will say, ‘I love cars, why shouldn’t I go and work with them?’” To this end Volvo also hopes that by next year women will make up 20% of its managers rather than the present 11%.
Lex Kerssemakers, the head of product planning, recognises the commercial benefit of involving women in every stage of car manufacture. “Women are more critical and have far higher expectations than men,” he says.
“It’s amazing that nobody has done this before — 65% of car purchases are decided by women, so we are failing over half of our customers by not considering their needs.”
It’s a bold move but in many ways it’s no surprise that Volvo is the first to make it, as Sweden is one of the most gender-PC countries there is. Not only do women have the right to employment in all occupations, including the armed forces, but men get 60 days off in paternity leave and nearly half of the Swedish parliament’s MPs are female.
But the YCC hasn’t been an easy first step in the right direction. “There was a lot of scepticism within some parts of the company,” says Kerssemakers. “A lot of people had to get used to not being in control. But I think any doubts have been put behind us.”
The designers also endured a certain scepticism working on the traditionally male design floor. “You have to deal with preconceptions of who and what a car designer is,” says Rosen. “People often don’t believe me when I first meet them.”
Not that such incredulity put her team off. “The all-woman team is a huge step forward not just for the car industry but for society in general. I feel there’s a lot at stake.” She is prickly towards suggestions that the car is nothing more than a clichéd and old fashioned male vision of what women might want. “We threw a list of suggestions about what to include in the car out of the window,” she says. “One was a cappuccino maker, another was a high-heel support in the footwell. But these were all suggested by our female focus groups.”
Her own vision for the car — which she is determined to see go into production within five years — is very much that of a 21st century woman. “I wanted the car to have presence and have attitude,” she says, “like a wild cat.” But she saves her most radical idea for last: “It’s not a car made by women for women, it is a car made by women for everyone.”