Honda Fit She’s, the
world’s only car aimed exclusively at women
Around the
world, building and designing cars remains a male-dominated business, and many
companies live by an old axiom that women will buy a man's car but men won't
buy a woman's car. While a few companies have attempted to bend that rule, only
Honda has chosen to embrace it with the Honda Fit She's -- the only model built by an automaker
today aimed exclusively at women. Hope you like pink, ladies.
There's a long and embarrassing history of automakers attempting
to lure women with ladies-only models. At the turn of the 20th century,
electric cars were marketed to wives with the pitch that their lack of
hand-crank starting would avoid broken shoulders and/or death. In 1955,
Chrysler made a bid for feminine attention with the Dodge LaFemme -- which came
in a two-tone pink-and-white paint scheme, along with a storage place for the
matching purse and rain hat. Lest you think modern executives learned from
errors of the past, in 2000 Ford showed off a concept Windstar minivan
developed with Maytag featuring a compact washer/dryer, microwave and vacuum in
the rear hatch, because why would a soccer mom ever want to be parted from her
appliances?
As women
have grown to buy more cars in recent decades -- accounting for about one-third
of car shoppers in the United States -- such attempts have given way to more
savvy marketing. But in Japan, the gender divide remains more stark; half of
all working-age women stay out of the workforce due to more stringent societal
pressure to choose homemaking over careers, a major reason Japan's economy has
been stuck in a rut for decades. But there's a cohort of younger Japanese women
putting work first, and in a weak market Honda sees an opening.
Launched
this summer, the Honda Fit She's designers say they wanted to take a regular
Fit subcompact and make it in their words "adult cute." That means
lots of pink: Pink stitching in the seats and steering wheel and floor mats,
matched by pink metallic bezels around the shifter and displays. There's also a
few extra shades of pink in the special She's badge, spelled with a heart for
an apostrophe. If pink isn't a customer's style, Japanese buyers can also
select a Fit She's in shades of brown and white that a Honda executive told the
Yomuri Shinbun newspaper match the color of eyeshadow.
To Honda's
credit, the Fit She's beauty treatment isn't just skin deep. It also comes with
special windshield glass that cuts 99 percent of ultraviolet rays and a
"Plasmacluster" air conditioning system that Honda claims can improve
a driver's skin quality, all aimed at stopping those wrinkles that turn adult
cute into just adult. With a starting price of $17,500, the Fit She's got an
attractive price for a home-market Japanese car -- but automakers wouldn't need
special editions if taking advice from women wasn't such a noteworthy event.
Sopir
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