Last night in Fremont California, Elon Musk celebrated the launch of the long-awaited Model X SUV, a follow up to its highly successful Model S sedan. Tesla wanted its third vehicle to be the Model E so that its product line would consist of an S an E and an X, but Ford refused to sell them the vowel, so it settled on the Model 3, a mass-market vehicle that will be launched sometime around 2017.

The Model X is critical to the continued success of Tesla that has been burning through cash at a rate of roughly $40,000 per car sold so far. Tesla has been on a spending spree to advance battery technology at its Nevada GigaFactory while simultaneously developing the Model 3 and preparing to launch the Model X. Last night we learned a few more details about the Model X crossover SUV--the bio-weapon defence mode button that will protect you from apocalyptic airborne toxic events was the highlight of the evening for me--but much about the car was already public knowledge, including its focus on women.  

“We’re certainly paying more attention to the needs of women in the Model X. We probably got a little too guy-centric on the S so, we’re hoping to correct that with the X.” ~ Elon Musk

Does the X in the Model X stand for the double-X chromosome? Is it possible that Elon Musk has discovered what women want?

Not so fast...

“I need to find a girlfriend…how much time does a woman want a week? Maybe ten hours? That’s kind of the minimum? I don’t know.” ~  Elon Musk attempts to apply the principle of least action to women

Musk has been forced to find out what women want because, according to Jessica Caldwell of Edmunds, women dominate the crossover SUV segment. But how does a company with an existing customer base that is 80% male perform a sex-change operation? How can Tesla uncover what men have been struggling for millennia to figure out?

Create a focus group! 

Tesla invited twelve women to a three-hour focus group in Palo Alto California with chief designer Franz von Holzhausen to find out more about this bewitching demographic. They discovered that:

  1. Women love wings. Tesla's Model X likely got its wings not from a focus group, but from a stroll down the aisle of the feminine hygiene section of the grocery store where it's clear that women have a thing for wings. The rear doors of the Model X have extra large wings that Tesla calls “falcon wings”. The bird-of-prey descriptor puts a masculine spin on a feminine feature that enables women (and tall men like Elon Musk) to step into and out of the car with ease...         
  2. Women like to rise above the traffic, but not in a showy way. You can't be in the SUV segment without knowing all about the H-point--the height of the driver's hip above the ground. Women, accustomed to being shorter than men, like to tower above them when they're on the road. It's called the “command position” and it's the only lofty perch many women will ever experience. Women tend favour less flashy cars than men, so the minimalist Tesla aesthetic that designer Franz von Holzhausen modelled after the athletic Tour de France cyclist, with a sinewy musculature and no excess body fat, should be a good fit.
  3. Women like to feel safe. 95% of women cite safety as a main concern when buying a vehicle. Safety was the first thing Musk mentioned at last night's event and the topic he lingered longest on (much to the dismay of the fully-charged audience that wanted to cheer fun things). Placing the drivetrain under the vehicle lowers the centre of mass and minimizes the likelihood of rollover, but the Model X also addresses one of Elon Musk's biggest concerns regarding the safety of the entire human race. Musk worries that intelligent women aren't reproducing. The Model X gives women seven seats to comfortably fill with themselves, their mates and five intelligent offspring.

With their estrogen cred fully loaded, Tesla designers turned their attention to men. The Model X has “mountains of storage” including a “frunk”--the empty space beneath the hood where the engine used to be. Everything a guy would  ever want to take on a man trip will fit into the Model X. Much has been made of the fact that a roof rack does not work atop a vehicle with falcon wings, as if transporting a canoe that can fly off and impale another vehicle is a good thing.

I don't know about you, but whenever I see a roof rack it makes me sad and a little scared. I wonder why this poor soul must transport such a large item from one place to another like a pioneer on a wagon train.  

Along with its mountainous storage capacity, men will also love the fact that the Model X has a ludicrous mode that Musk refers to as "so fast it's wrong". Imagine an SUV that will go from zero to sixty in 3.2 seconds--faster than a Porsche 911!--with a turning radius better than a Mini. I don't know about you, but I find those performance specs incredibly scary. Minivans and SUVs are among the most reckless vehicles on the road. Whenever I see “Baby on Board” I gird my gears because I know that a sense of invulnerability combined with a born-to-be-wild denial of suburban domestication often results in high-risk driving behaviour.

Giving soccer moms and dads the power to drag race Porsches is not a good thing. Fear of prematurely draining of the 240 mile-range battery will be the only thing that keeps the rest of us safe from a high-speed encounter with a Model X. Take your time perfecting that battery technology, Elon...

Telsa's Model 3 will benefit most from the GigaFactory's advances in extending  battery performance and reducing costs, but the Model 3 will not make it to its launch event without the financial support of the Model X. The weight of enormous expectations have been loaded on the Model X's ample frame with the future of a car company and its fossil-fuel-free vision of style, performance and functionality hanging in the balance.

Will women buy in to Tesla's electric future and help it reach its sales target of 500,000 vehicles by 2020? Will preventing Mother Earth from being trampled to death by carbon footprints play a role in women's car buying decisions? Who knows, but never before in the history of marketing have women so commandingly been in the driver's seat.

About the Author: Lynne Everatt has an MBA from which she's still recovering and has written a couple of books, blah, blah, blah. She wishes she could be in the audience tonight as Tesla puts on a “wait-but-there's-more” kinda show that Katie Fehrenbacher of Fortune says is even better than Apple because it's at night and features celebrities, hot musical acts and an open bar.

Here is Tesla's 2012 reveal of the Model X which is better from an entertainment perspective than last night's event which was like a fairly typical corporate presentation with a drunken audience.