Over the past decade there has been a shift in the automotive industry away from traditional family sedans to SUVs and women have a played significant role in this movement. How, do you ask?
The Audi Q5 is a sporty luxury SUV.
In Australia and the USA, women directly purchase 45% of all new cars and the Harvard Business Review found that women make the final decision in 80% of automotive purchasing decisions. Ernst & Young have reported that by 2025, women will be responsible for 75% of all discretionary household spending, some $28 trillion globally!
What cars are women buying the most of? SUVs of course! The popularity of SUVs appears to know no bounds. In Australia, for the first time ever SUV sales outstripped the sales of passenger cars in 2017.
In the luxury SUV market sales increased in 2017 for both small and medium sized SUVs. Mercedes-Benz has the greatest market share in the luxury car market in Australia with almost 30% of all luxury vehicles sold; this figure is largely thanks to their luxury SUVs and small cars such as the A-Class and CLA.
If you think about Porsche, you think 911. But in 2016 sales of their SUV models, the Macan and Cayenne, outsold their sportscars by more than double!
This is what a Ferrari is meant to look like in my opinion.
The popularity of SUVs has seen every major luxury car manufacturer making or announcing to make an SUV model. These include the Bentley Bentayga, the Rolls Royce Cullinan and the Lamborghini Urus, which has already been renamed the ‘Uterus’ by some. Even the last bastion of defiance, Ferrari, has announced they will have an ‘FUV’ available as early as 2019.
Although women may be buying cars in record numbers, it’s not all plain sailing for car companies and dealerships. Women-drivers.com conduct surveys of women in the USA and they have found when a woman leaves a dealership without buying a car for whatever reason, there is a 60% chance she will not return there. So it’s important that sales personnel get it right the first time.
The Lamborghini Urus will attract more women to supercar brand.
Chatting with women about their dealership experiences, I’m amazed that even in this day and age sales personnel still treat men and women differently. Assuming that a woman needs her husband’s help to purchase a car is one of the most common mistakes. Proactive car companies are working with their dealerships to ensure these bad experiences do not occur.
Although there are few women in Executive roles of the major car companies around the world, the power of women in the automotive industry cannot be underestimated. The rise of women purchasing new cars has seen a shift in the entire automotive industry into the age of the SUV.