First time I have seen this thread. A Tesla group for women might be fun!
I am not single, but I am female and an aerospace engineer, which seems even rarer most days. My husband is also an engineer, but of the software sort, so he doesn't like to get his hands dirty.I am the one normally found out in the garage working on the cars or fixing up stuff around the house.
I trend towards the nerd spectrum being an engineer, so I currently own a Volt which is the coolest tech car out there other than Tesla. Reserved my Model 3 (the Model S is out of my price range) and am really looking forward to officially becoming a Tesla owner.
Just saw this thread pop up. I'm male, but my SO is the car person in the family. Her father was a mechanic who ended up owning a car dealership in Portland. She spent her spare time as a teen working at the dealership and learned a lot about cars working on them with her father. She wanted to be a race car driver, but this was long before any woman had competed in any major races (like Janet Guthrie) and she is incredibly smart so her father encouraged her to take a more intellectual route.
When she graduated from college she and her then boyfriend traveled around North America for six months in a VW bus. She tells of dropping the engine in a parking lot in Detroit to adjust the valves and replacing generator in North Carolina. Her boyfriend was way too emasculated by the experience and the relationship didn't last very long after they got back.
She also tells the story of changing the battery on my car on our second date. I did the heavy lifting, but she was the only one with hands small enough to reach the retaining bolt with the tools we had. I was quite impressed she could determine the exact size of the bolt head by feel alone.
She's scary knowledgeable about old cars. I've seen her identify a classic car when all she saw was a tiny corner of the bumper.
She doesn't had many problems with sales people of any stripe. If they start giving her the runaround, she either leaves or hangs up (if on the phone). Last time she bought a car, she figured out what she wanted and at what price, called all the Subaru dealers for 100 miles around and gave them one chance to meet her price. If they tried to haggle, it was "I guess you don't want to do business with me, bye!"
I am the engineer of the family and I did work in aerospace (at Boeing from 87-94), but I'm an Electronic Engineer by training and do mostly software these days. I'll get my hands dirty with a soldering iron and have been a lab rat since my teenage years, but I've never been that into cars. Aircraft are a different story (going to the Chino air museum as a kid beat Disneyland hands down).
