You drive, but are you a motorist? Probably not. You become a motorist only when you fall in love with cars and begin to think that driving is one of those simple pleasures, like having beer or fags. Ask any car crazy guy and he is bound to echo these sentiments.

And guy is the significant term here: women don't seem to have love affairs with their cars, nor do they regard the right to drive as the American equivalent of the right to bear arms. Women also know that men are funny about cars, what with the models they like to see draped over bonnets, the phallic shapes and the language they use about them. Women, by contrast, are more pragmatic about cars. Or are they? The car industry is currently trying to persuade us that all those stereotypes about cars and the fairer sex are changing. Of all new cars sold in Europe, U.K and U.S.A, 42% are bought by women. And it's estimated that women now have an input into 80% of all car purchases.

A recent market research, by market research firm MORI, showed that women are more interested in different car designs than men. The research revealed that women are just as attracted to "masculine" designs as men are, and vice versa.

Jaguar found that men and women use precisely the same terms to describe their cars, and are attracted to the same attributes. Mazda discovered that 48% of purchasers of its small sports car, the MX - 5, are female.

Ford is so alert that it describes this as the "most important trend of the decade". It has set up "a woman's marketing panel", involving female employees from different departments in all stages of the design and marketing process. Their suggestions for larger and simpler dashboard switches and tailgate handles have been integrated into all Ford designs, most notably in the Ford Ka and the Ford Focus. There are also moves to recruit more women into engineering and design. The whole process, according to Fordspeak is "dedicated to changing business practices to the benefit of all women customers". Which just goes to show how wonderfully the mind is concentrated when commercial interests are at stake.

Aren't cars the quintessential stuff of male fantasy symbols of power and speed, through which men project ideas of dominance and control, as embodied by the overtly penile shape of the E-type Jag?

Walk into any motor show and it is certainly an overwhelmingly male experience, packed with men tenderly stroking bodywork, having earnest conversations about "poke", "mid range performance" and queuing to sit in cars which they probably will never own. Most of the cars' interiors too look like a techie's bedroom : full of "navigation systems" and "subwoofer outputs".

A new generation is emerging from the design quarter, however, insisting that the deeper trends are towards moving away from the male car culture, which will increasingly be left to what they call only "petrol heads".

According to Niki Smart, a Ford designer, there are two tendencies dominating car design. One is emotional cars with personal characteristics. These are fun cars with friendly names, like the Ford Ka, and now more recently, the new VW Beetle. The other type is more logical, more purposeful, like the Audi TT range, which has a cleaner, more aesthetic look.

Gender doesn't influence attraction to the different types, according to Niki Smart : it's a division between those who want their car to make a statement about assertiveness & ambition and those who want a funky product.

This is the current trend in the automotive design revolution. Products are selling for their design now, not just for the product. Indications are that people now want a car that's a cool product. Ms. Smart also predicts the eventual dominance of the funky designs, and there's widespread agreement that this is the face of the future.

Professor Penny Sparke, another automotive design historian, thinks something has been liberated which was always present in our relationship with cars, but which used to be buried under a "masculine paradigm". She goes on to say that, men and women look at and use cars in the same complex ways as they look at each other and themselves.

The main motivating factors here are desire, narcissism, envy and a quest for self-identification amidst social, psychological and cultural needs which are deeply rooted within us.

Cars satisfy a buried bisexuality, citing the very feminine attributes with which men often invest these pieces of powerful machinery. With the freer society we live in now, it's not surprising that more androgynous designs are emerging. But while designers may promote an attractive androgyny, they also foster the identification between the body and the car which lies at the heart of our car-dependent culture.

Henry Ford's first car was an object of utility, but since there has been competition, fantasy is what cars have been about. It's an enrichment of our culture to have objects, to have symbolism and express fantasy. It would be indeed a very dull automotive world if utility and function were the only values.

Whatever the designers tell us the identification between body and car is stronger for men than it is for women. It's men who suffer more from road rage, thought to be caused by feelings of anger at invasion of personal space. Women are also less likely to be deluded into thinking of the car as their second skin.

While men and women want the same attributes from a car, they want them in a different order of priority, with safety a much higher priority for women.

Accident statistics prove that in spite of having more accidents in car parks while parking, women are significantly safer drivers, with 65% of all speeding convictions going to men. Men are 17% more likely than women to have a head-on collision and 50% more likely to hit a pedestrian on the pavement. Men are also involved in more fatal accidents. In fact insurance companies recognise that men and women present different levels of risk while driving.

Overall, more men than women hold driving licences, while women of all age groups over 20 are more dependent on public transport than men. The journeys they make also tend to be shorter: school runs, shopping, short-distance commuting etc.

Men use their cars for business trips and long-distance commuting. Many women say they would happily swap their cars for pleasant walking conditions and better public transport.

To sum up one can say that the car industry has a vested interest in wearing down women's resistance to total identification with their cars. But even in its androgynous soft-focus incarnation, the motorist still seems to be an exclusive, predominantly masculine category. Women don't just have their eye on the road, but also on the
pavement. It's as well that that should continue.