“Lady driven or taken for a ride?”

By TONY NGARE

A couple of days ago, a good pal of mine dropped a hot email on a cold morning.

“While skimming through the classifieds section to get a feel for the wording of car-for-sale ads, I grew increasingly irritated and perplexed as a seemingly innocuous phrase appeared again and again: ‘Lady driven’.

“The fact that ‘lady-driven’ is still a selling point for used cars in this country is not only sexist, but also illogical. Do potential buyers really think that a car driven by a woman will somehow be in better condition than if a man had driven it?

“Women, it is said, don’t drive as ‘hard’ as men do, and treat their vehicles more delicately. I know many women, however, who defy this stereotype.

“It is also argued that women are better than their male counterparts when it comes to keeping their vehicles clean. Yet there are plenty of men whose vehicles are in pristine condition day in and out, both externally and internally.

“Furthermore, unlike mileage or road-handling capabilities, it is difficult to verify whether a car has indeed been ‘lady driven’. In fact, several male friends have confessed to falsely describing their vehicles as lady driven to attract more buyers.

“The fact is that the condition of a vehicle is no more linked to the sex of the driver than it is to the driver’s eye colour. We would all be stunned to see the words ‘Caucasian driven’ or ‘Christian driven’ in an ad, so why does ‘lady driven’ raise such few eyebrows? It is 2014 for crying out loud!”

This got me thinking, and I talked to a few men to establish their take on this ‘saga’.

“I don’t get it,” Paul, my neighbour, told me. “When an advertisement proclaims a car ‘lady driven’, what is it trying to prove? That the car has been handled with care? After seeing the way some women drive, do you think that is a selling point?”

Seeking to do what civil societies refer to as ‘wide consultation’, I approached a male workmate.

“I’m not sure why this would be a selling point,” he said plainly.

“If anything, I think that the men I know have maintained their vehicles better than women, since men tend to postpone going to the garage as long as the vehicle moves. So what is the particular advantage of a ‘lady driven’ car? Or am I missing something?”

A friend who owns a garage advised that a potential buyer should not go by anything in inverted commas. Rather, get a mechanic whom you can trust to check the car, and tell you whether it is in good enough condition to buy or not, regardless of the species that has been at the steering wheel.

In my opinion, the perception that ‘lady driven’ cars are more smoothly driven and in better condition overall is fast running out of truthfulness. This phrase won’t sell any more.