Women's Auto Help Center Debuts: A Special Website for Women Car Buyers
31 October 1997
Women's Auto Help Center Debuts: A Special Website for Women Car Buyers
SACRAMENTO, Calif., Oct. 31 -- A new website that provides
free research to women car buyers and answers women's questions as they shop
for new vehicles launched this week on the Internet.
Called the Women's Auto Help Center (http://www.womenautohelp.com), the
site is the first to offer automotive information tailored to women's
interests and actively invite questions from women who want to know specifics
about the vehicles they're shopping for. Women send their questions via e-mail
and receive feedback, all without having to step into a car dealership, talk
to an auto broker or have a dealer or broker get their name and call them up,
trying to pitch them on a car. Best of all, the Women's Auto Help Center is
free.
"The Women's Auto Help Center has a philosophy: Women should be treated
with respect and with courtesy, and they should feel comfortable and
knowledgeable when they are spending thousands of dollars for a new vehicle.
That's the mission of the Center _ to help women gather and understand the
information they need to help them make choices in their car purchases," said
Ann Job, founder of the Center.
"With the Center providing personal answers to women's questions, there is
no reason for a woman to feel uncomfortable, intimidated and alone when
shopping for a new vehicle anymore," Job continued.
Job, an award-winning journalist with more than 15 years' experience in
automotive writing and the first Batten Fellow at the University of Virginia,
is joined at the Women's Auto Help Center by a group of accomplished women who
have years of varied experience in the automotive business and who are on the
Center's Advisory Panel. Among them are Patricia Waller, head of the
University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, and Betsy
Phillips, president of Conoly Phillips Lincoln Mercury of Norfolk, Va.
Phillips' dealership has, at her insistence, a special women-only room called
the Women's Automotive Resources Center.
Like a magazine, the Women's Auto Help Center site features articles on
topics that strike a chord with women: health and safety (in the Your Car &
Your Health section), relationships (in the Your Car & Your Mate and Your Car
& Your Kids sections), and style and fashion.
"They are not your typical Motor Trend magazine kind of stories," Job
said. "They are written with an eye toward how women think about and relate to
their vehicles."
For example, one of the featured stories at the Women's Auto Help Center
discusses General Motors Corp.'s redesigned minivans and the efforts,
explained by a woman engineer at GM, to make them the industry-leading
"no-hurl minivans" -- minivans built to reduce instances of carsickness among
passengers, especially children.
Another story, about the Plymouth Prowler hot rod-styled two-seater,
describes Chrysler Corp.'s surprise that the Prowler has unexpected appeal to
women.
The Women's Auto Help Center also gives away prizes each week to
women who e-mail the Center.
The Center has been under development for more than a year, after
Job got on the Internet one day at her home in Sacramento and searched for
sites using the keywords "women" and "cars" and then, "women" and "autos" on
various search engines.
"You wouldn't believe all the porn sites that popped up," Job said,
adding that she was unable to locate sites combining the help center resource
she had in mind and women-tailored articles.
And, she noted, with women now buying half of all new cars in the
United States and influencing the purchases of fully 80 percent of the new
vehicles, the time is ripe for such a Center.
"Women spend more than $81 billion in the new-car market every
year," Job said. "That amounts to more than $221 million a day. Yet I had one
young woman tell me she finds buying lingerie more enjoyable than buying a new
car. That's not right."
SOURCE Women's Auto Help Center
