(femme acheteurs, clients) https://marker.medium.com/electric-cars-have-a-women-problem-9b5b0ac15af0 Electric Cars Have a Women Problem 2020-01-07 Steve LeVine
From Tesla to Ford, electric carmakers are all making the same mistake — only marketing to men. [image] musk Photo: Frederic J. Brown/Getty Images U.S. and European automakers, confronting a shrinking market, are banking on a technological transformation to shore themselves up and win greater favor from Wall Street. But they seem to have forgotten something — women ... ... the major auto companies, in addition to a few deep-pocketed startups, are rushing out dozens of electric vehicles, seeking a prominent share of a new market for next-generation transportation. All are betting that, in the next decade, electrics will begin to capture significant chunks of the market from conventional vehicles and that the most successful companies could even be rewarded with much higher, Silicon-Valley-level stock valuations on Wall Street. But the industry has mostly overlooked a key lesson of the last decade and before: Women are their lifeblood. Since the financial crash, motorists have all but abandoned traditional sedans and embraced SUVs, which are now about half of the entire new vehicle market. Women have led this charge, buying 55% of crossovers, the biggest single segment of the SUV market, and about half of SUVs as a whole, says Thomas Libby, an analyst with IHS Markit, a business research firm. Women are even more important — they appear to be the primary influence for some 85% of all new U.S. vehicle purchases, said Mark Schirmer, director of public relations at Cox Automotive, an industry research firm. But, so far at least, women have bought relatively few electrics. According to Libby, they account for only about 30% of electric vehicle purchases. The weak appeal to women may be a considerable factor in tepid sales for most electrics, which account for just 1.4% of U.S. vehicle sales. What is keeping women out of electrics? So far, carmakers seem to have aimed electrics largely at men. “Elon Musk’s sexy, coveted, and very expensive Tesla has made the EV a masculine status symbol,” said Virginia Scharff, a history professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico. The industry has mostly overlooked a key lesson of the last decade and before: Women are their lifeblood. Unlike men, typical women buyers are shopping not for themselves alone, but their family, which explains why they are mainly purchasing SUVs. According to Scotty Reiss, founder of Girls Guide to Cars, women want SUVs because of their hip-high seats “so you can slide right in.” They are more concerned than men are with safety and price, too, along with cargo space to fit kids and their stuff. Kate Schox, a founding partner in Trucks Venture Capital, an investment firm, said an SUV’s greater height gives her more visibility of the road ahead. “I live in a city, I carpool kids, I am small in stature and feel more comfortable sitting higher up in a car, and I drive A LOT! … A Bolt or Leaf is too small, a Tesla too expensive,” she said in an email. The global automobile industry is in trouble. Depending on whom you ask, the decline of demand may continue another one, two, or more years: In the U.S., light vehicle sales were down 1.5% in 2019, and they dropped in the U.K., India, and most other major countries, too. Given the scale of the industry, the broad decline was a drag on the global economy as a whole. According to the International Monetary Fund, the malaise cut 0.5% off of global GDP growth, a fifth of the 2019 total. In a small way, electrics are helping. BloombergNEF, a clean energy research firm, forecasted a 12% rise in sales last year over 2018. But that was still just 2.2 million vehicles, or 1.4% of the global market. A GM spokesman said the gender data is correct but declined to comment further. Ford and Tesla did not respond to emails. But one wonders why the industry has not made women its clear target. One might argue that focusing on men isn’t necessarily a bad strategy — after all, according to IHS Markit, men buy 86% of the F-150, the single biggest-selling vehicle in the U.S. for four decades running. The problem with that argument is that while pickups do sell quite a bit — about 16% of all new vehicle sales — they pale in comparison with SUVs, which are about 50% of the market. Crossovers, at about 21%, are larger than any other single segment. Instead, of the 16 electric vehicles currently on offer, most are sedans, like the GM Bolt and the Nissan Leaf, or high-end SUVs, like the $86,000 Tesla X, the Audi e-tron at $75,000, the Jaguar I-Pace at $70,000, and the $68,000 Mercedes-Benz EQC — too costly for most buyers. Only the Hyundai Kona is priced at a more affordable $38,000. Oddly, women were treated as the primary market for the first generation of electric cars, according to Scharff, the University of New Mexico professor and author of the 1991 book Taking the Wheel. Carmakers then associated power and range — and thus gasoline cars — with men, and the simplicity, comfort, and quiet of EVs with women. “Elon Musk’s sexy, coveted, and very expensive Tesla has made the EV a masculine status symbol.” Now, Scharff said in an interview, women drive more trips with passengers than men do and make more multi-stop trips as well, both of which underpin the preferences for SUVs. Women also give greater scrutiny to the sticker price. “Any car that costs a lot will end up being bought by more men because men still tend to have more money than women,” Scharff told me. “Women are very practical auto customers. Their preference for SUVs/crossovers was largely based on the functionality/practicality of these products,” Tony Posawatz, former CEO of EV startup Fisker Automotive and a former senior GM executive, said in an email. He also noted, “Attending to female customers will be vital to the growth of EVs.” Tesla is the one runaway success in the electric car market. Behind the star power of its CEO, Elon Musk, Tesla ignited the age with the release of the Roadster in 2008. In 2012, it unveiled the wildly popular Model S sedan and then an SUV called the Model X. What all three had in common was a sticker price near $100,000 once you added in a few extras. In 2017, Musk triggered global pandemonium with the Model 3, costing some $55,000 and more because Tesla had initially produced only high-end versions. What Musk didn’t do was understand women. In his high-profile launch of these vehicles, conducted always in slickly produced, late-night, webcast soirees, Musk seemed at least technically to understand that women should be his primary focus. In his 2015 launch of the Model X, he confined most of his remarks to the No. 1 issue for women — safety, calling the X “the safest SUV on the planet.” But his initiative barely seemed to matter, overshadowed by the X’s high price and eccentric styling, like gull-wing doors, seemingly aimed at men. According to IHS Markit, men bought two-thirds of the Model X’s sold in the first nine months of last year. They bought 70% of the Model 3’s and 73% of the Model S’s. Musk may be targeting women, but to many women, Teslas are tailored for men. “Attending to female customers will be vital to the growth of EVs.” This is not only an American phenomenon. Pure EVs are just 2% of the European market, according to InsideEVs.com, an online publication focused on electric cars, but they need to sell in higher numbers — and fast. Over the next two years, EU regulations require automakers to reduce CO2 emissions by an average of 20%. To get there, European automakers will have to boost EV sales or face up to 25 billion Euros in fines, according to one estimate published in Financial Times. But the automakers there, too, have a women problem. Like the U.S., Europe has a mania around SUVs, which are 35% of all new sales. In a 2018 paper, Benjamin Sovacool, a professor at the University of Sussex, said that older men account for most electric car purchases in five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. There is resistance to EVs, he told me. “Many women regard them as substitute cars. They are afraid that they will run out of electricity and freeze to death,” he said. Some research and investment firms are forecasting that, in the early 2020s, a sharp decline in the cost of lithium-ion batteries will bring down the sticker price of electric cars, making them cheaper than combustion vehicles. Sam Korus, an analyst with ARK Invest, said that, at that point, economics will drive a large number of buyers to electrics, whether they are men or women. Perhaps that’s true, but history argues for a continued primary female role. Later this year, Tesla will release its mainstream-priced Model Y compact crossover, which ought to appeal to women more than prior Tesla models. And Ford will debut its Mustang Mach E. Reiss, the Girls Guide to Cars founder, predicts that the Mach E “will be a game-changer for electrics.” She points to the $40,000 price tag, half the price of many luxury SUVs and crossovers. “The design is just gorgeous,” she said. Then she mentioned history. “The predominant buyers of Mustangs have been women. They look at it with a lot of nostalgia. It’s the first car they passionately wanted or that their father let them drive.” [© marker.medium.com] https://www.google.com/search?q=female-buyer-market-car ... https://www.google.com/search?q=women-buyer-market-car https://www.google.com/search?q=female-buyer-sales ... https://www.google.com/search?q=women-buyer-sales + https://observer.com/2020/01/elon-musk-mother-maye-model-dietician-interview-book-women-self-help/ At 71, Elon Musk’s Model Mom, Maye Musk, Is at Her Peak as a Style Icon 01/07/20 ... “We’d buy second-hand clothes. We couldn’t afford to go out and eat. I fed them peanut butter sandwiches. My kids loved it! They didn’t know they were deprived,” ... (Elon Musk and his mother, Maye Musk, in 1995) https://nyoobserver.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/art15_1995-nyc-elon-and-my-book_r1.jpg For EVLN EV-newswire posts use: http://www.evdl.org/archive/ {brucedp.neocities.org} -- Sent from: http://electric-vehicle-discussion-list.413529.n4.nabble.com/ _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
