What can unite a blue-haired, roller derby jammer; a crash expert; an organic gardener with specially trained hearing skills, and a Harvard master’s degree candidate with a patent for lighting technology?

In addition to being engineers and moms, they all bring expertise and unique perspectives that make the 2013 Chevrolet Malibu fuel-efficient, safe, extremely quiet and available for purchase today.

Malibu moms Suzanne Cody, Julie Kleinert, Kara Gordon and Tracy Mack-Askew also help demonstrate the important role women and mothers play in engineering today’s family vehicles.

The Malibu is Chevrolet’s first global midsize sedan, and will be sold in 100 countries on six continents. Though based in Metro Detroit, the Malibu moms’ work will be felt from Birmingham to Bulgaria, Ann Arbor to Austria and from St. Clair Shores to Seoul, Shanghai and beyond.

“People spend a lot of time in their vehicles,” said Gordon, the Malibu’s lead acoustic noise engineer and mother of two active young boys. “It’s really important for me to spend that time with my kids in a positive way. If your car isn’t quiet, you can’t hear your kids talking to you in the background, and you can’t hear how their day went.”

Gordon recalls an incident that drove home the importance of her work.

“We were about to get on the freeway and my younger son was mumbling something I couldn’t hear. I kept asking him over and over what he was saying and my older son finally yelled, ‘His seat belt isn’t buckled.’ So I pulled over – luckily – before we actually got on the highway.”

Involving more engineer moms in vehicle development is happening as women continue to take a bigger stake in the market. Women buy a little over half the cars sold in the United States, and take part in 80 percent of all family car buying decisions, according to traditional industry statistics.

Yet according to the American Society of Engineering Education, the percentage of undergraduate engineering degrees going to women in 2009 was 17.8 percent, a 15-year-low.

Recognizing this need, General Motors and the GM Foundation support several programs aimed at encouraging women to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects, including high school robotics programs and college scholarships.

“Women are major automotive consumers, and automakers that want to appeal to them need to understand what their needs and requirements are,” said Rebecca Lindland, director of research at IHS Automotive. “Women engineers can provide a unique perspective to the design and engineering process. For example, women are generally smaller than men, so ergonomic needs are different. We also have a heightened awareness of safety, and tend to be more sensitive to the needs of family.”

“We need to encourage more young women and girls to venture into engineering and show them it’s not just numbers, but it’s color and style and design,” she said. “Women add a necessary element to enhance a vehicle’s appeal and the entire development process benefits from that added dimension.”

Meet the four accomplished women engineers and moms behind the 2013 Chevrolet Malibu:

The Malibu moms

Suzanne “Suzy” Cody, aerodynamics engineer – Cody is a rocket scientist – literally – with a degree in aerospace engineering. Known for her “GM blue” hair highlights, she is also a force to be reckoned with in the wind tunnel and on the roller derby track.

A mother of two young boys, she has been responsible for the aerodynamic performance of the new Malibu, and her work has resulted in a vehicle with a superior wind drag rating – close to that of the Chevrolet Volt electric vehicle – which means increased gas savings for Malibu drivers. In fact, aerodynamic improvements on the new Malibu provide up to 2.5 mpg more on the highway.

“I’m a single mom, and every dollar I spend on gasoline is a dollar I’m not investing in my boys’ futures,” said Cody. “So this is personal to me.”

Her knowledge of wind drag also helps her on the Bath City Roller Girls roller derby team, where fans know her as Shovey Camaro, after her passion for the Chevrolet Camaro sports car. Cody is also a passionate leader of a local moms club that helps support local charities.

Julie Kleinert, child safety technical lead – As the lead engineer responsible for child occupant protection, Kleinert’s job is to evaluate and develop the safety performance requirements for the vehicle restraint systems that will protect children who ride in the Malibu and other GM vehicles.

“Knowing that the work I do helps protect other people’s children is very rewarding,” said Kleinert, a mother of four and grandmother of two. “I love to be able to tell people what I do, and how much work goes into the safety of every GM vehicle.”

Kleinert relies on her 27-year engineering career and extensive knowledge of restraint system performance and vehicle safety integration, along with her real-world experience and perspective as a mother and grandmother. Her commitment to child passenger safety doesn’t stop at the end of the work day.

As a certified child passenger safety technician, she volunteers with Safe Kids USA’s Buckle Up educational programs to teach parents and caregivers about proper car seat installation and about child safety in and around vehicles. She utilizes her experience from working in the field with parents and caregivers to help drive interior designs that make child safety seat installation easier in the Malibu and other GM vehicles. Because three out of four child safety seats are incorrectly installed, Kleinert said, she urges parents to take advantage of local check-up events, even if they believe they are using their child safety seat correctly.

“When my kids were teenagers and learning how to drive, they didn’t always appreciate having a mom who was a safety engineer,” said Kleinert. “Now that one of my sons has two children, I put my child passenger safety training to good use by teaching him and my daughter-in-law how to properly install car seats in their vehicles.”

Kara Gordon, lead acoustic noise engineer – Gordon is a specially trained audiologist whose sensitive hearing skills – always a tactical advantage for a mother – helped her identify where certain noises may have originated, and how to reduce, block and absorb the noise from entering the cabin of the new Malibu. She is key part of a team that eradicates the main sources of noise – wind, road and tire – from entering the interior of the new Malibu.

Her work has helped make the new Malibu the quietest Chevrolet ever for interior cabin noise and, as a result, customers around the world can expect a quiet ride.

With two young boys, Gordon’s home isn’t always as quiet as the Malibu, but she adds a little serenity with yoga and enforces a house rule of quiet time until 9 a.m. on weekends.

“At 9, all bets are off and the house becomes a circus!” she said.

Gordon is also a passionate environmentalist who hopes to live “off the grid” soon and loves tending to her organic garden and remodeling her 100-year-old home.

Tracy Mack-Askew, vehicle line manager – Mack-Askew’s passion for science and math was sparked during a high school field trip to view a vehicle crash test. That experience led her to pursue an engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an engineering career at GM following graduation.

Today, Mack-Askew serves as lead engineering manager responsible for the timely development and launch of the Malibu, a role with great challenges and responsibilities – and one typically held by men. She also has a patent in lighting technology that helps prevent premature lamp burnout.

As a wife, a mother of two young children, and a Harvard University master’s candidate (she already has a master’s degree from Purdue University), Mack-Askew is also an accomplished multi-tasker.

Ultimately, she says, it’s her commitment to cultivating and nurturing a strong family that drives her. Mack-Askew won’t travel on her husband or children’s birthdays, and despite a hectic travel schedule that saw her log about 40,000 miles in less than a year in support of the Malibu launch, she is adamant about picking up her children from school on Fridays.

“The Malibu is a vehicle that is very kid-friendly, that’s easy for you to use to transport your kids to their activities – whether it is soccer or swimming – and that makes you look good and stylish while doing it,” said Mack-Askew.  “So not only are you a mother, but you are mother with pizzazz.”

On sale now

The 2013 Malibu Eco is Chevrolet’s most fuel-efficient Malibu ever, delivering an EPA-estimated 25 mpg in city driving and 37 mpg on the highway.

The Eco is the first model of the all-new Malibu lineup to launch in the United States. It went on sale earlier this year and starts at $25,995, less than competitor full-hybrid vehicles.

Other Malibu trim levels, including LS, LT and LTZ, are scheduled to begin production this summer at plants in Fairfax, Kan. and Detroit-Hamtramck, Mich. The 2013 Malibu will serve as a flagship Chevrolet midsize in many parts of the world. The Malibu is also built in China and Korea.

To learn more about the all-new Malibu, visit the Chevy Facebook page; follow on Twitter at @Chevrolet and #MalibuMoms, or check out chevy.com.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: the original and the sequel.

Ian Fleming is best known, of course, as the creator of superspy James Bond. And while his gadgets are fantastic (and beloved by geeks), the Bond movies aren’t really family-friendly fare with the violence and innuendo. But Fleming also wrote a book for kids: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; The Magical Car, which was later adapted into a movie (by Roald Dahl, among other people) starring Dick Van Dyke … and that’s the version of this magical car that most people know.

I was no different: I saw the movie as a kid, and I’ve watched it with my own kids. I knew (from the movie credits) that it was based on a book by Fleming, but I never got around to reading the book myself. Then I got a copy of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again, a new book by Frank Cottrell Boyce, approved by the Ian Fleming Estate. In the Author’s Note at the back (which I read first), Boyce mentions his experience seeing the movie for the first time, and then getting the book so he could immerse himself in the story again — only to find that it was quite different! I decided that I really needed to read the original before diving into the new book.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang heralded a new era for my daughters and me: shared storytime. My wife and I have been reading aloud to our daughters since they were born, and we fell into the habit of “two stories before bed.” We’ve had to miss on occasion (so I can’t compete with Alice Ozma) but for the most part each daughter gets two stories every night. Well, that’s a much longer proposition when your kids move from picture books to chapter books, and sometimes we were spending well over half an hour reading stories before bedtime. Fun, to be sure, but it can be a bit of a time crunch when you’re trying to do all the other bedtime stuff. So I suggested to my kids that they might both enjoy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which we found at the library. We read it (and the new sequel) together.

Like the movie, the original book does feature a wacky inventor named Caractacus Pott, and two twins named Jeremy and Jemima. And there is whistling candy and a Lord Skrumshus (“Scrumptious” in the movie) the candy tycoon. But there is no Truly Scrumptious (the love interest), because Mr. Pott’s wife Mimsie is still very much alive. And there is no Vulgaria and no Baron Bomburst and no land where children have been banned. In fact, I was most surprised at how much shorter the book seemed than the movie: the Potts buy an old beat-up car from a once-famous racing driver and fix it up, and it turns out that the car seems to have a mind of its own.

As in the movie, the car has some secrets, allowing it to fly and float, and the Pott family has some adventures traveling to France and foiling Joe the Monster, the biggest crook in England. The way Fleming tells the tale, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is almost sentient. She seems to signal to the family, or stop driving before she hits a booby trap … but maybe it was just some electrical short, some little coincidence that made things work a certain way. At other times, though, it’s clear that Chitty is giving the Potts commands, as when a particular knob flashes and says “PULL!” … and when they wonder about it, the text changes to “PULL IDIOT!” (Never mind that missing comma.)

My kids loved the original, even the somewhat creepy bits involving Joe the Monster and his gang, and it was fun to see what solutions would pop out of Chitty next. The Potts were great characters in their own right: when the kids get kidnapped they come up with some clever plans to foil the crooks. Oh, and the book even ends with an actual recipe for Monsieur Bon-Bon’s Secret “Fooj” (fudge).

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the sequel exactly, except that it was clearly not quite the same vehicle on the cover. Indeed, the new version starts off with a totally new family, the Tooting family: Dad and Mum and Lucy and Jem (short for Jeremy) and Little Harry. When Dad loses his job at Very Small Parts for Very Big Machines and starts going a little overboard with his “home improvements,” Mum hits upon a brilliant solution: she brings home a beat-up 1966 camper van for him to fix — thinking that it’ll be impossible, thus keeping Dad occupied and out of everyone’s hair.

But he does in fact get it running. When Dad and Jem stop by a junkyard looking for some replacement parts, they discover an enormous old engine and Dad decides that it would fit the van, so they shove it in. And then the adventures start. As the Tooting family takes off for a grand vacation — Paris, Cairo, maybe some lost cities — it turns out the van has some ideas of its own. Chitty’s heart (or engine, at least) has a new body, but she’s interested in finding her old parts and pulling herself together again.

The sequel does a fine job of playing with the original concepts while bringing it into modern times. This is great, because the original (written in 1964) is a little dated and you may have to explain some concepts to your kids. Jem expects a vehicle to have four-wheel drive, satnav, super de-icers, and the family relies on GPS and cell phones and the like — things kids today will readily understand. As they travel the world and begin to piece Chitty back together, though, the whole family begins to realize that maybe new and modern isn’t always the best.

The characters in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again are terrific. The parents are wonderfully funny — Dad is dreadfully annoying to his kids, but he means well; Mum has a good head on her shoulders and is great at handling Dad. Lucy, the angsty teen, paints her room black and likes tragic stories, but you learn not to underestimate her. Jem is the one who learns to understand Chitty the best. Little Harry, though just a baby, does play an important role as well. And there are others, too — of course there’s a villain (though I won’t spoil the surprise) and there are various links throughout back to the original book.

My kids thoroughly enjoyed the sequel as well, my eight-year-old especially. They both put up with my horrible British accent (the Tootings are from England, of course) through the entire book. (Oh, and I should mention that reading about an amazing 1966 camper van made me want one of those Lego VW vans even more.)

The ending is wide open for another sequel: part of me wishes it had just concluded with some solid ending, but I can see how Chitty is a car that begs for more stories. I don’t know if there will be more in the future, but you can be sure that my kids and I will be along for the ride.

If you love gadgets and gizmos, check out Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again.

Disclosure: GeekDad received a review copy of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again.