THE new YCC car from Volvo is the first to be designed entirely by, and for, women, but at first glance they needn’t have bothered. It looks like they got the fat bloke propping up the bar to think of every sexist joke about female drivers, and build it into a vehicle.

Women, you know, can’t park, so this car has an autopark function, that lets you know you whether you can fit the space, then steers the car into it.

We all know that traffic jams are caused by silly girls adjusting their hair in the rearview mirror, or ferreting for their handbag in the back, so the YCC — Your Concept Car — has a groove in the headrest for your ponytail and incorporates the gears and handbrake into the steering wheel so as to provide a storage locker close to hand.

And, despite the fact that women are statistically safer drivers, that’s not what White Van Man thinks, so the entire rear end of the car is a specially toughened bumper.

It’s only a surprise that it doesn’t go all “moody” and try to run over male pedestrians every time it needs a service — but hey, that’s why the car automatically contacts the garage when it needs fixing (how could a woman tell?), and the bonnet is sealed shut to stop women meddling in what they don’t understand.

I was not predisposed to like the YCC when I took the wheel. The result of two and a half years of market research, I believe, hadn’t got much closer to answering the age old mystery: what do women want? They now account for nearly 40 per cent of car sales in Britain, forcing manufacturers to chase after their cash. But the pursuit has been down blind alleys. Of course, they won’t go for the same “mid-life crisis” red sports car or, even more tragically, Saab convertible as middle-aged, male middle-managers.

But why, for instance, is the Ford Ka the girliest car in the country (69 per cent of purchasers are female), but models directed specifically at them, such as the Lotus Elise or the Ford Focus Elle, leave them cold? If women outnumber men in buying the 4x4 Suzuki Jimny and the sports car Mazda MX-5, why do they universally hate mass-market estates? Designers are so confused that Ford, Volvo, and Land Rover have all installed “women’s panels” of engineers and pollsters to try to incorporate female-friendly features.

But this is where they are going wrong. The YCC is in fact a beguiling creation. The interior is made of pale wool and blonde wood, the silvery roof fabric interwoven with fibre-optics to create pulsating mood lighting, and the seat covers are as changeable as those for mobile phones.

These are not feminine touches, unless that it how you would describe Apple’s abandonment of the greys and blacks of computer technology for the tactile white of the iPod and the iMac.

The appeal of the gull-wing doors has nothing to do with not getting your new shoes wet, they are just extremely cool. Women and men buy the new Mini in almost equal numbers because it is well designed. We should all put our foot down — to be pleased, not patronised.

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