the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

PANDERING WILL GET YOU NOWHERE 85
“I believe you will agree that this unusual car has great appeal to
women,” a Dodge sales manager boasted in a letter to dealers that he
surely came to regret, given the La Femme’s dismal fate in the marketplace.
When Dodge discontinued the La Femme after just two seasons,
division president M. C. Patterson claimed to have sold 2,500 of them,
though years later, company historians would put the number at between
300 and 1,500.
“Not too surprising, even back in the mid-’50s, we didn’t sell too
many of them,” Chrysler vice president for marketing and communications
Arthur Liebler told the Reuters news agency several decades later. “I
guess we just didn’t get it at the time.”
While the car that one critic ridiculed as “La Fiasco” quickly vanished
from the marketplace, the Dodge La Femme has earned a lasting,
albeit dubious, place in automotive history. It wasn’t actually “the fi rst car
ever exclusively designed for the woman motorist,” as Dodge proclaimed
it to be. But it was quite possibly the most exquisitely tacky styling faux
pas ever made, so perfectly cloying that even a satiric kitschmeister such
as filmmaker John Waters would have been hard pressed to make it up.
More important, the La Femme became the perfect symbol for many
years’ worth of ham-handed, patronizing- to- the- point- of- being- silly attempts
by the boys in Detroit to woo female customers, who now make up
52 percent of the $85 billion U.S. new-car market. Despite their vast
numbers, until recently women were about as inscrutable to car executives
as the Style Network might be to the typical ESPN viewer.
But in a small but significant way, the La Femme’s over-the-top
ridiculousness may have helped the car industry eventually to see the
light. Today, in addition to prompting eye rolling and smirks when it is
mentioned, Dodge’s gaily colored bit of gaucherie helps inspire a new generation
of auto designers to create cars that are better suited for female
drivers, by providing a blueprint for what not to do.