PLEASURES OF THE ROAD : IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT : When it comes to merchandising automobiles, today’s woman is a power to be reckoned with. What does she look for? What does she buys? And what do car manufacturers and dealers do to attract her?

The hour of revenge could be at hand.

Revenge for the pain inflicted on auto-show models by thousands of hours in high heels.

Revenge for the sisters still missing from the executive suites and plants of America, Europe and Japan.

Revenge for every woman who has been propositioned or told to come back with her husband when she enters an auto showroom ready to seriously shop.

Revenge for the underpowered but pretty-looking cars that men have built and advertised over the years for the “women’s market.” Today they quietly call their pseudo sports machines “secretaries’ cars;” in the ‘50s they brazenly marketed powder-blue sedans to housewives.

Revenge for--let’s really hold a grudge here--the 25 years it took the auto industry to get rid of the hand-cranking engines that required the 19th century equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The means for economic vengeance is now available: Today, women buy 45% of all new cars sold--a $50 billion shopping expense this year alone--and they participate in 80% of all new-car purchases. They buy up to 17% of the nation’s light trucks. And they are responsible for 28% of the spending to service vehicles--another $12 billion in 1988, according to a study by the marketing research firm J. D. Power & Associates of Agoura Hills for Family Circle magazine.

In 1970, women were buying only 23% of new cars; as recently as 1984, they were responsible for only 19% of the nation’s spending on vehicle maintenance. Despite the growth in their automotive clout since then, the women’s market hasn’t yet reached its peak.

Low-priced cars from Third World nations are tempting women--whose typical overriding concern is to avoid mechanical breakdowns on the highway-- to purchase these cars with their warranties rather than used cars of similar price. Other factors that are likely to keep the women’s market growing include the growth of the truck market, which remains predominantly male, the number of women who choose to live on their own and therefore make their own car-buying decisions, and working women’s collectively increasing income.

That kind of spending power surely is enough to raise a revolution in the auto industry.

Unfortunately for the would-be rabble rouser, change seems to be coming with little drama. However, for those who simply like to drive cars--exciting cars, safe cars, fun cars--this evolution within the industry spells good news.

Today there are nearly 600 models built by 39 different car makers or divisions--each with a self-starter--from which to choose. And women are choosing them all. That means that any design revolution is far more likely to be demanded by the large group of 6-foot-plus-tall men who can’t fit into expensive Italian sports cars than by women, with their diffuse demands.

Take struggling cartoonist Carole Sobocinski: She swears she hasn’t owned a car as wonderful as her faded blue 1978 Dodge Aspen since she purchased one of the first Mustangs built. It’s mechanically reliable but has other important features: “In Chicago, with its bad drivers and car thieves, it’s perfect. It already came smashed--not smashed enough to affect driving, just a little smashed--so other drivers think I drive like that and they get out of my way. It’s boring and the radio has already been torn out, so thieves don’t want it. It’s calm blue and boxy, so it doesn’t arouse feelings of anger. It has really good power steering so I can park in amazingly small spaces.”

Once Sobocinski gets syndicated with big merchandising rights, she plans to drive an Alfa Romeo Spider. (Convertibles are the car of choice for a surprising number of women, considering their usual concern over security that they express in surveys. The Volkswagen Cabriolet led J. D. Powers’ latest list of cars most purchased by women and the Suzuki Samurai--touted as America’s least-expensive “convertible”--was the “truck” with the highest proportion of female buyers in 1987; last year its popularity dipped, however, in the wake of the Consumer Reports test that rated the vehicles “unacceptable” because of an alleged propensity to roll over.

Across the Rockies, Toyota’s top saleswoman is driving a Cressida for very different reasons. “It’s a heavy car--I have an infant--and is safe,” says Barbara Cadkin, Toyota of Marina del Rey. She adds low maintenance costs and room for passenger clients to her list of car needs.

Patty Moise races Buicks on the NASCAR circuit and Buick provides street cars for her. One of her favorites is the Buick Grand National with a turbocharged, intercooled V-6 engine--it brought out the hot rodder in her. “It’s killer-fast in a straight line,” she says. “I got kind of wild with that one.”

Get this group together to form the basis of a New Women’s Revolutionary Party? Hardly. The result would be automotive anarchy. Indeed, surveys of the women’s market repeatedly demonstrate that women want the same things from their automobiles that men do, only in slightly different orders and degrees.

Women seek reliability, safety, value, comfort, performance, handling and style. They are more likely than men to buy new cars rather than used. Of the new-car buyers, women tend to be younger and more often single; therefore, combined with their lower earnings, their purchases are less expensive than men’s--$12,500 versus $14,000, according to a new study by Maritz Marketing Research Inc., Toledo, Ohio, for Newsweek magazine.

They don’t consider themselves mechanical but they are more likely to have thoroughly researched their planned purchase than are men. The Maritz study confirms that women continue to buy more Asian-built cars than men--38% owned an Asian import versus 28% of the men surveyed . An earlier study, by Power for magazine publisher Conde Nast, revealed that this is affiliated to the imports’ reputation for reliability. However, like men, more women own domestic cars than imports.

Surprisingly, the Conde Nast study found resistance to luxury European cars among women, who expressed concern about the reliability of the cars’ advanced electronic technology. Apparently the technology proved itself in the two years since that landmark report on the women’s market. Maritz found that 4% of its respondents--male and female--had recently purchased a new European car. As further evidence that the fear of technology has passed, Buick’s new two-place sports car, Reatta, is attracting an unusually high share of women buyers despite its video-game-like controls.

“Women are getting more comfortable with technology,” says Jean Pellegrino, Power’s administrator of dealer services.

From her base in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Jayne Hamilton, founder of Market Development Associates Inc., travels the country preaching a common-sense approach to selling cars to women at the dealership level. Hamilton insists women are very interested in automotive safety features. “Any of the so-called high-tech innovations are great for the women’s market,” she says. “Most women do not understand these innovations per se, but when they learn about the long-term benefits, these safety features take on a very strong appeal.”

The auto industry--car makers, importers and dealers--has been taking people like Hamilton seriously for only a few years. Advertising aimed at the women’s market date to the 1920s, and one Oldsmobile executive recalls his division sending out literature to salesmen in the 1970s on how to sell to women. Chrysler Corp. was one of the first to form a women’s marketing committee, in 1978. But it has only been during the last five years--as competition among auto makers heated up, surveying procedures became more sophisticated and women’s purchasing power became more evident--that industrywide efforts to attract women began in earnest.

Some--such as Buick and Chevrolet--sponsored broad-based women’s conferences. Ford and its dealers teamed up to produce seminars for women on buying, maintaining and driving automobiles. Pontiac began sponsoring sporting events that appeal to women. Volkswagen and Chevrolet targeted women in direct-mail campaigns that offered special rebates. (The men of the household could use the coupons, but it was the women who received them.)

The jury is still out on whether such specific targeting, tastefully done, is effective. Some auto makers admit they too would so target their audiences if they had the advertising money to spend that a Ford or a Chevrolet has.

Others--including some women consultants who have a vested interest in propagating women-specific programs--advise against gender-based campaigns. They like the Yugo and Audi warranties that cover maintenance items such as belts and fluids; the increasing number of luxury-car makers offering warranties with road service; the light and open floor plans of Hyundai dealerships; the first-time buyer programs of the Detroit’s Big Three that get young people into new cars. These kinds of strategies all directly appeal to women without appearing to patronize them or discriminate against men, they say. By and large, it is the strategy of the importers of Asian cars.

Detroit, Tokyo and the scattered European auto capitals have long addressed the product demands of their audience, male and female. From the trivial--toggle switches that can be operated by long-nailed fingers--to the vital--seat belts, air bags, suspensions, crash-absorbing sheet metal and effective brakes--more and more auto makers are doing a first-rate job. Many in the industry believe that within a decade, the quality of all cars will be so even that the only way a customer will have to distinguish between competing brands will be the quality of service delivered by the dealer.

There lies the rub. Car companies can send all the video training tapes in the world to dealerships, and the bad ones will ignore them. Or their salesmen won’t be around long enough to watch.

But there is evidence of a turnaround. Women are far more likely than men to fill out the surveys sent by the factories to judge how satisfied customers are with their dealers. The shoddily treated woman will, Hamilton promises, get revenge.

Other consultants carry similar messages, and they are being hired by car makers and dealers. Women are beginning to populate the ranks of dealers and sales forces across the country. A few dealerships are even turning to women as the liaisons between customer and mechanic in the service department.

Carl Sewell Cadillac-Sterling, Dallas, may be the model upon which the new generation of informed dealerships is patterned. Each customer is assigned a service adviser who develops with that person almost a doctor-patient relationship, carefully chauffeuring the ill car through servicing each time. The customer returns to that same service adviser year after year, car after car. Frequently, the salesperson’s assistant will pick up and return a customer’s car for servicing. Such service is extended to both men and women, but women have been particularly loyal customers of the dealership. Its retail service business is believed to be the largest in the nation.

Convenience such as Sewell offers is far more important to women than to men, according to the Family Circle study. Extended hours and geographical convenience were the most important factors cited by women in choosing a mechanic. That’s because women who are in charge of their cars simply have less time than men, says Power’s Pellegrino. That study, like the others, shows that women are more loyal than men to a mechanic or dealership that treats them properly. These studies indicate that in a surprising number of cases it is only the dealership--not the fine styling or features of an automobile--that determines which car a woman will buy.

Women generally dislike bobbing and weaving over price and trade-in allowances. Their displeasure has led to phenomenal growth in the popularity of brokers--professional car shoppers who will deliver to them the best deal in the area on the automobile they want by doing, for a fee, the haggling with dealers.

Others turn to the increasing number of buying clubs--through their credit union, insurer or even discount store--for a car delivered at a specified dollar or percentage-over-invoiced price. Dealer associations frequently try to stymie such practices, but many in the industry believe that until the mystery is taken out of dealer profit margins, well-informed women--and men--will increasingly take revenge on the distribution system in these ways.

Yet there is evidence that the enlightened are winning the gender battle in this industry. The Maritz study found more women than men satisfied with the dealer, the way they were treated at the dealership, the knowledge and courtesy of the salesperson--even in the dealership’s willingness to bargain on price. Seventy-four percent of the women and 73% of the men surveyed said they “definitely” or “probably” would return to the same dealership for another car.