Career Change Puts Woman in Driver’s Seat : After leaving her job as an insurance company vice president, owner of Auto Savvy in Santa Ana decided to turn love of cars into a profession.

If you drive a Ferrari, you’re a bit of an exhibitionist, you like performance, and you’re an affluent, fun-loving risk-taker.

Drivers of Volkswagen “bugs” are freethinking, anti-Establishment, trendy types.

And if your car is a Chevy Suburban, you are well-to-do and probably have lots of interesting, sports-related hobbies.

Marguerite Mason’s philosophy is that each person who can afford it should own the car that fits his or her personality. “A car is part of the package,” she says. “You’re in it so many hours, it’s like you’re wearing it.”

As owner of her one-woman company, Auto Savvy in Santa Ana, Mason helps match people to the right car. Or she assists collectors who search for a specific model, from Ford Pantera to Porsche. Or she can ensure that a would-be car buyer is well-informed before walking onto a car dealer’s lot--knowing beforehand what to pay, which options to buy, crash test results, trade-in value, and the best financing deal.

Her customers pay $50 an hour, with the bill usually totaling between $300 and $800. They are primarily women who have had bad experiences with car dealers. When she opened for business a year ago, she served one or two people a week and spent hours networking, explaining what her company does. Today, she handles one or two customers each day.

“People find me,” she said.

Mason’s own car is a champagne color, 1983 S-class Mercedes that she calls “Gertrude.”

She got a wicked gleam in her eye when asked what a maroon Dodge Colt, for example, might say about a person. Then she quickly recovered when she realized that that’s the car I drove up in.

“Oh, it says you like things solid and reliable,” she said carefully. “You’re analytical. A Dodge Colt is not an impulse buy.”

Mason said she actually dreams of red, sporty Fords, but she believes that her relatively conservative Mercedes is a holdover from her days as an insurance company vice president. About six years ago, at age 45, she realized that she did not enjoy that job any more.

“What happened to me happens to people all the time,” she said. “You run headlong through a traditional career, then you look up one day and say, ‘Is this all there is?’ ”

She created a three-year plan for leaving her job. She hired the person who would eventually replace her, paid off her credit cards, saved money and waited for her son to graduate from high school.

She quit in 1989 without knowing exactly what she would do for a living. A two-day workshop called “Career Breakthroughs for Executive Women” helped her realize that she could turn her love of cars into a profession. Her father had taught her to drive when she was 12, on the back roads in eastern Oregon, and as an adult she had raced in auto rallies.

During the workshop, she said, “I was talking about putting together a racetrack experience for a bunch of women. And somebody said, your face looks lit up like it hasn’t looked since you’ve been here.”

She did eventually take some friends out to the racetrack. But it took several months to figure out how to turn that inspiration into a business. She sought approval from the Department of Motor Vehicles, which told her that she could do everything but help her clients negotiate directly with car dealers. For that, she would need a dealer’s license herself.

She does sit in on negotiations, though, when asked. And she invites the client to step out for coffee and a chat if things are not going well.

“I always say, ‘Know what a good deal looks like before you walk onto the lot,’ ” she said. “You should go in prepared, confident and knowledgeable.”

Does she ever regret the years she spent in insurance, away from cars?

“Yes, and yet, as I look back on it, it all happened with perfect timing,” she said. “It allowed me to get my son raised, save the money to launch a business and learn solid business skills.”