Member Article

They're Queens of the Road

With International Women’s Day on the horizon, Sylvia Daniels, Head of HR at family-owned, Swansway Motor Group, which runs dealerships in 20 locations, explained, “Many of our group functions are headed up by females, me in HR, Anna Ling in Marketing, Jo Bailey in Accounts, Sarah Eccles in Fleet and Louise Connell, in Aftersales Support; this isn’t by design, it’s on merit and women have contributed some extremely important things to the motor industry and to driving in general”.

Without Mary Anderson, we’d all be struggling to drive in the rain; she invented the manual windscreen wiper in 1903; which was only bettered by another woman Charlotte Bridgewood, in 1917, when she invented electronically operated automatic windscreen wipers, making life even easier and safer for motorists, then and now.

Head of Marketing, Anna Ling added, “There are so many women who’ve contributed to todays motoring scene; Bertha Benz who went on the first long distance car journey in her husband, Karl Benz’s car, that brought attention to his company and to the its first car sales, a brilliant marketing tool”.

Women have been involved in designing cars for many years, when German-born WWII refugee, Helene Rother, reached the States she quickly became Detroit’s first female car designer working in GM’s interior designing staff.

“Women are still designing brilliant cars with Amy Rimmer the winner of Autocar’s ’Great British Women in the Car Industry Rising Stars Award for her work on autonomous vehicle technology at Jaguar Land Rover; women have always had and continue to have a role to play in this fast-moving industry”, added Sylvia.

But we shouldn’t forget the Kings of the Road, who not only gave us Rolls Royce cars, Mercedes Benz, Audi and of course, Henry Ford, who made motoring affordable for the masses and Percy Shaw who made driving so much safer when he invented Cat’s Eyes.

“Balance and equality are important in every area and I hope that highlighting the Queens and Kings of the Road goes to show that”, added Anna.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Karen Walker .