The Mud Life 4×4 Magazine Issue 41 August 2022

Hippy HippyAche!

Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin’ world go round

At the end of May I had the chance to see Queen and have Adam Lambert sing this to me live in Manchester, and it was brilliant. OK maybe Adam didn’t sing it directly to me, but as a fat bottomed girl I claimed the moment, though I am beginning to think that car designers don’t believe these lyrics.

I think they believe everyone has a narrow, emaciated, waif-style arse, and design accordingly. This is not surprising as statistics gathered in the US showed that only 19.8% of automotive designers are women, proving most car interiors are designed by people who have narrow hips and normally do not have a lot of ‘junk in the trunk’.

Designers are so used to thinking of men as the default, and women as a sort of niche. It has been proved over and over again that men design for men, and don’t seem to, (or don’t want to) understand how women’s bodies are different, and how those differences need to be addressed in product design.

Some of the more famous examples are: police stab vests that don’t account for breasts, safety goggles that are too large for the female face, work boots that don’t fit women’s feet and my favourite, that time when NASA had to cancel the first allwomen space walk, to much public outcry, because they only had one properly configured medium spacesuit on the International Space Station, and they needed two. What was more telling is that they actually only have M, L & XL suits on the station, so if you are a smaller woman in space you are stuffed.

So what has this to do with cars?

Over the past four weeks we have had four different cars delivered to test for a week at a time, and for three out of the four I couldn’t drive them without the seat belts digging in to my hips.

Now before you think “fat b*tch, just lose weight”, I will tell you that, although I am overweight, I am in proportion, and my backside does not protroud beyond the width of the seat, so why am I having such issues?

Well in the belief that more space is wanted for the ever-increasing size of the centre cubby and console, some designers have decided that instead of cutting out the shape for the seat belt mechanism from the console they will just cut the shape out of the seat space!

We had two Hondas, the CRV & HRV, both in which the designers had decided that this was the way to go. Not only did they cut out the seat, but the socket bit actually protrudes into the seat space even more!

It made for a rather uncomfortable drive, but I realised that if I just dropped the seat down to it’s lowest point I could get the seat belt to sit slightly above my hip. Not the ideal driving position, but at least I wasn’t in pain, which couldn’t be said for the third car, the SsangYong Korando.

You will find out what Damian thought of all the cars over the next month or two, but unfortunately they only thing I can tell you about the Korando is this….

I drove it for 3 minutes, in two 1½ minute stints nipping up to the shops, and in that miniscule time I got a f***ing painful bruise on my hip, due to SsangYong’s designer jamming the seat belt holder between the console and the seat, and then using a triangular ‘torture device’ of a seat belt catch to stick out right into where you sit.

It was as bad on the passenger seat side too, so for a whole week I refused to set foot back in that car – it was that painful!

I will end this mini-rant with a plee to the designers of this world – please think about other people who don’t have the same dimensions as you. You figured it out (eventually) when it comes to sliding seat tracks, allowing the steering wheels to be moved up, down, forwards and back, and when you put the adjustable height seatbelts in, but strangely you have yet to figure out that women are built with wider hips. Could this be because this issue doesn’t affect you?

I beg you to look at, and talk to, your wives, sisters, mums and female friends, and hopefully realise we have curvier bodies, and stop sticking things in a car that stick out in uncomfortable places. Honestly, they will all thank you for it!