Audi is claiming women want butch, masculine, testosterone-saturated designs when it comes to their automobiles. Though it isn’t clear if they’re doing this because the automaker conducted extensive research on the matter or because they happen to be selling a muscular-looking crossover they’re really hoping will be popular with women.
Truth be told, while we wouldn’t have expected male and female tastes to perfectly overlap, we didn’t know that women were biased toward vehicular beefcake one way or the other.
“It was an error in the past to think that all women want sweet cars,” Audi exterior designer Matthias Fink told Automotive News Europe in a recent interview. He likewise claimed that female customers have professional lives and want a car that reflects their equal status, just like men. We would like to be the first to welcome Mr. Fink and the rest of Audi to 40 years ago.
However, what constitutes a “sweet” car is debatable. Volkswagen’s Beetle springs to mind, and was clearly marketed with women in mind when it was relaunched as the “New Beetle” in 1997, but the model never managed to convince every female pickup driver in America to make the switch — seemingly proving Audi’s point, we suppose.
Audi’s Q3 is moving to the MQB platform for the second-generation, gaining some aggressive new styling in the process. The small crossover is currently only surpassed by the Q5 and A4 sedan in terms of sales and has been relatively popular with women. However, that’s true of crossovers in general. Audi simply doesn’t want to lose the demographic.
Reaching a little deeper into its bag of tricks, the Q3 also gets more interior volume (which everyone is likely to appreciate) and more advanced safety features (which women are slightly more inclined to want) as standard equipment. Among those are park assist, lane-keeping with assist, rear cross-traffic alerts, and emergency automatic braking whether you’re in drive or reverse. On the more advanced end of the spectrum is the Q3’s adaptive cruise assist, which uses the vehicle’s 360-degree camera suite and provides a virtual bird’s-eye view of the car’s immediate surroundings. It’s all rather advanced, even if it’s not groundbreaking, and Audi thinks women will love it.
There’s also a massive 12.2-inch Virtual Cockpit available for those that find the standard 10.3-inch unit insufficient. Center screens can be similarly upgraded.
However, this is still a bit of a chicken and the egg situation. We’re over here wondering if Audi actually designed the car with women in mind during its “bodybuilder” MQB makeover, or if someone in its marketing department had a panic attack over the holidays and thought they’d need to remind everyone that women can still dig stereotypically macho-looking cars. It’s a good-looking vehicle and that should be enough to please just about anyone shopping within the segment.
The 2019 Audi Q3 will arrive in North America right before the summer. Official pricing hasn’t been announced, but last year’s model started at $32,900. We’re betting the new one will be a little more expensive but ballpark around $33,000. Though that will come up quite a bit depending on how much horsepower you want Audi to squeeze out of the 2.0-liter turbo. Anywhere between 184 and 236 horsepower is available. Europe also has access to a dual-clutch transmission while Americans are left with the standard eight-speed automatic.
[Images: Audi]
You know it’s a station wagon, right?
Too short to be a station wagon, it’s a hatchback. Pictures make it hard to see it basically the size of a typical Golf.
May be. Looking at the 2018 model specs, compared to the GTI:
GTI/Q3:
length 168/172.8
wheelbase 103.6/102.5
front track 60.6/61.1
rear track 59.7/61.2
width 70.8/72.1
height 57.8/62.5
But this article really needs a Bertel Schmidt spin
^^^ beat me to it!!
lolz
#popcorn
I think whats “butch” to a woman is different then whats butch to a man. Perhaps not in all cases but in a blatantly masculine sexist sort of way in most.
Okay…
All women, and most guys these days, want is to sit higher and have grey/black plastic cladding around the wheels, beyond that they don’t give a crap what it looks like.
Reportedly the US versions will have body color cladding.
Excellent! That should make us ALL merry and gay!
Mary is gay?
To paraphrase Bunkie Knudsen statement for transforming the stale Pontiac brand in the 1950s, “you can sell a woman a manly car, but you can’t sell a man a girly car.”
This Audi is hardly masculine, I would call it “crossover neutral”, like they all are
I wonder if this Audi represents a new entry into the ridiculous ever growing orientation list. Hmmmmm…
Until they start using “transsegmental” I’m not worried.
It’s a new feature- halfway through its service life, the car can suddenly self-identify as something else.
“It’s a new feature..”
Well… 20 years ago Chrysler’s cloud cars would spontaneously re-identify as scrap metal but they seldom made it to halfway through a normal service life.
Oh no, now all the Audi dealers will have to install gender neutral service bays, that will be expensive
“halfway through its service life, the car can suddenly self-identify as something else.”
Is that anything like “halfway through driving to your destination, it can suddenly say ‘no’ and you are obligated to stop and sit at the side of the road”?
There’s stuff you can slip into the gas tank that will make your car go as fast and far as you want
“Baby, it’s cold outside”
I’m triggered.
At first glance I thought that was Hannibal Lecter.
Well hallo, James2.
Except for the clown wheels, gorgeous car!
Are there women in this forum? Any? Who can clarify this issue from the source? Or this is the sexist site? I am not a woman if you wonder. But on the other hand who knows… There might be women who pretend to be a man.
A twist on Subaru’s tactic of selling wimpy cars to butch, masculine women.
Jeep intentionally markets 4door Wranglers to lesbians…just as Subie does with its products. Lesbians were a top purchasing demo for FJ40 too.
The Xterra! That was a car which sold disproportionately to lesbians, I believe. Didn’t work for my sister, though; she had a Wrangler.
Little late to the party, Audi. Subaru has known what a woman wants in their SUV for decades now.
Another woman.
Bertel references and Subaru jokes, reminds me of the good old days.
All Subarus come standard with trailer hitches, so their owners can bring a Uhaul on their first date
Well, car companies do market research on this kind of thing, so maybe Audi knows what it’s talking about. How much research has Posky, or indeed any of us, done on the subject?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
One personal data point: my wife drives a 2018 Audi Q5 and likes it. Whatever that means.
To be fair, it’s difficult to make these tall and stubby safety pods look “butch” in any way, shape or form. Lexus gives the best effort here IMO. Though it ends up looking ridiculous, the faces look pretty angry. That’s not Audi’s style though.
Its funny because all these things seem to have been spawned by the rousing success of the Suzuki Aerio AWD.
Superdessucke, the way you make a CUV look more “butch” is to make it look more like a truck. More straight lines and fewer obviously curved lines. For example, the Ford Explorer has an flat roof like a SUV while the Lexus RX and its clones have a curved roof. The Lexus predator grill in front fails to make RX look significantly more masculine because they can’t hide the egg shape profile.
You are absolutely right, just look at Range Rovers, they’re not popular because of their reliability, they’re popular because of their straight-forward looks and to some extent their ability
Fair enough comment, but I think that’s still difficult to do when the vehicle is tall and stubby.
Repurpose those Beetle flowers that are still in the warehouse, and put them on the dipsticks. That’ll sell ’em.
There is nothing butch about that ministationvan. Women may like butch but this doesn’t prove that.
Back in the old days, the auto industry thought that women wanted cute. That didn’t really work because they were based upon on men’s perception of cute. (There was even a Dodge La Femme, with storage for purses and lipstick.)
The Ford Explorer brought the SUV into the mainstream by adding a car-like interior. That won over suburbanites, including women, and completely changed the market (probably for the worse).
Ride height is now the thing. Bullies want to use it to bully, while the meek don’t want to feel bullied. Funny how these things work.
A lot of women like cute, but most of those women also hate cars. And now, since they live in cities, they don’t have to own them.
If Dodge made a La Femme now that looked exactly the same but scaled down 50%, with 5 inches of ground clearance and AWD and every form of connectivity and heater and defroster available, it’d sell like hot cakes. Since every woman I know is obsessed with anything from the 50’s, two tone and finned. Of course a lot of them love wood panelled wagons as well but I just have weird friends.
The super-cute niche is just a niche.
The VW New Beetle skewed heavily female. They sold well enough until everyone who wanted one had bought one.
The New Beetle’s main benefit was that it helped to sell more Jettas. The Beetle got them into the showroom, but they left with something that was less cutesy and more practical.
” (There was even a Dodge La Femme, with storage for purses and lipstick.)”
A total marketing disaster, turns out they were all purchased by male hair dressers and interior decorators
Audi also claims the sky is blue. Why else do the Wrangler and Ram Rebel exist?
Agree with the statement that any crossover (except maybe the Stelvio and some of the six figure machines like the Urus and Cullinan) is about as masculine as RuPaul
I don’t think this is a bad looking car
Big agree. I think that was probably all Audi needed to worry about.
These angular grotesques adorning current cars may indeed give their owners some evolutionary advantage on the teeming turnpikes of life. Once I spot them in my rear view mirror, I never want to see it again, so I’m happy to merge right and let that car pass, with its hideous death mask and all.
My wife is a woman (have to clarify that since I am from Bay Area) and she likes Jaguar sedans and not new ones but retro classic ones made under Ford.
Did we marry the same woman?
Not. It is simply original Jaguar appeals to women in general.
“My wife is a woman (have to clarify that since I am from Bay Area)”
Finish clarifying. Does that mean you’re a woman?
That engine bay gave me a eureka moment.
Ever since forever I’ve adored body-color blue & green sheet metal surrounding the engine but with an ICE only a dedicated restorer could keep it clean, and never on a daily driver.
But EVs would never foul such a compartment!