Women Set Record In Truck-Buying
Men still drive most of America's trucks, but since 1986 industry records show the percentage of women behind the wheel has slowly but steadily climbed from 15 to a record 25 percent last year.
"Clearly, we're seeing the female buyer driving the market," says Robert Maling, a national vice president for Toyota, which sells one of the hottest truckish vehicles, the RAV4.
Automakers are beginning to make design changes with women in mind and some are targeting models to them. Even the rolling symbol of good ol' boyness, the pickup, is broadening its appeal to good ol' women.
Automakers define light trucks as pickups, vans and truck-car hybrids known as sport utility vehicles like the popular Ford Explorer and Chevrolet Blazer and the newer Kia Sportage and RAV4.
Some growth is explained by family minivans, with women in 42 percent of them last year. But sales of those have cooled since 1992 while other trucks have stayed hot. By 1995, women made up 34 percent of sport-utility drivers and 16 percent of small pickup drivers. The bottom line to the numbers: Each year, thousands more women are choosing trucks over cars.
There's a temptation to interpret the trend as a symbolic upshift in America's socio-sexual transmission - tougher vehicles for today's tougher women. Certainly, the rugged image appeals to some buyers. But automakers and dealers view it more as evidence of other trends that have made trucks and their cousins, sport
utilities, attractive to a broader range of buyers, regardless of gender.
It's not women as much as the trucks that have changed, says Mike Maroone, president of the Maroone Automotive Group, which sells Chevrolet, Geo, Dodge, Olds, Isuzu and Ford throughout Florida.
In the last decade, adapting to a new breed of buyers, began making them more carlike and civilized with CD players, leather seats and rides softened from the bruising truck standard.
"I think they've taken the macho out of some of these products," Maroone says.
NISSAN CONFIRMS IT WILL BUILD NEW MODEL IN U.S.
Nissan says it will increase production in North America by 150,000 vehicles within three years by switching production of its subcompact Sentra to Mexico and adding an all-new model at its Smyrna, Tenn., facility.
The new model is thought to be a smaller, lower-cost companion to Nissan's Pathfinder sport-utility vehicle that would compete with the Toyota RAV4, Honda CR-V and Jeep Wrangler. Nissan won't confirm those plans and said only that it will be done by 2000.
- Seattle Times news services