The Lady Is For Turning Electric

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When it comes to electric cars there is, and has always been, one consumer to aim for: The Lady.

2020 may be the year of the electric car movement, but EVs are not the brain wave of an environmentally driven 21st century inventor. They were first realised in the early 1830s when inventors in Britain, the Netherlands, Hungary, France and the US trialled different versions of battery-powered vehicles. By the latter half of the 19th century, France and England began building the first workable electric cars. Across the pond William Morrison produced the first successful US electric car in 1890.

These electric cars were bred for urban transport. Fleets were soon replacing horse-drawn carriages in the major cities of the US and becoming the new taxi cab in New York. By 1915 the number of EVs in the US stood at 37,000 and the largest car manufacturer was The Electric Vehicle Company. Electric vehicles were simpler, cheaper to operate, and more appealing than those with gasoline engines which remained dirty and unreliable. The first female motorist in the US was identified as Genevra Delphine Mudge of New York City, who drove an electric car in 1898, whilst a Miss Daisy Post was reported to have also driven an electric vehicle the same year.

The success of electric vehicles was due in part to the fact that they were greener than gas, efficient and had lower running costs, but mainly it was due to their marketing. They were singled out as the car for women.

And they were well suited to the needs of women at the time. Contemporary social norms meant that women tended only to travel short distances. The slow paced (14mph), clean and fresh EV with a limit of a single charge 30-mile range was perfect in the eyes of the fathers and husbands wishing to buy transport for their dependants. Women were supposed to be found at home enjoying the feminine pastimes of taking tea in the sitting room and the most effectively marketed EVs were sold as “sitting rooms on wheels”.

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The woman of 1900 was considered to have a taste for luxury and leisure whilst being too timid and weak to handle a “man’s” car with power or range. The slow and steady but elegant electric car was ideally suited to a mere woman. Gas cars, it was considered, required much more strength to crank start than most women could exert. Electric cars, on the other hand, were female-friendly because they needed very little maintenance and had few mechanical failures. This meant an easier life for women who “did not have a mechanical turn of mind” as one New York Times reporter wrote in 1909.

One hundred years on, are EV manufacturers missing a trick by overlooking the Ladies? In 2018 an English-Scandinavian study found that highly educated women were the ideal target group for EVs but were largely ignored as a consumer group by manufacturers. In so doing car brands have failed to convert the most willing group to electric.

The study established that women drive fewer kilometres per day, so range angst is less of a problem. Women rank ease of operation, safety, running costs and environmental impact higher when buying a new car than men. This makes electric cars the perfect tick-box answer. Yet the study also found that women have less experience of driving electric vehicles than men, proving that the market is failing to grasp the desires of the female consumer.

Understanding your consumer is the first rule of selling. Professor Benjamin Sovacool, lead author of the study and Director of the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand (CIED) at the University of Sussex certainly thinks so: “The sooner that electric vehicle manufacturers and policymakers understand how these factors influence the decisions people make about their transport choices, the quicker people will switch to more sustainable modes of transport.”

It is surely time then that manufacturers turned their attentions to the fairer sex. Ladies lining up for the latest EV? That seems a greener future to me!