'Mother Proof' Car Reviews

Woman Translates Mechanical Terms Into Plain English

(CBS)  When you are looking to buy a new car, do you find all the technical information available just so much mumbo-jumbo? Any idea what all those facts and figures mean when you're driving to the mall?

The Early Show correspondent Melinda Murphy has the story of a woman who's translating it all into plain English.

Watching Kristin Varela on her morning routine, you might think she's going about the business of a stay-at-home mom: Driving to the supermarket; taking her oldest daughter to school; picking up the dry cleaning; but what we might call errands, Varela calls business research.

"You know, I'm on this mission," she says. "This quest for the quintessential mom-mobile, and that drives me."

Varela is the founder of motherproof.com, a Web site offering a different kind of car review.

She explains, "Mother Proof is a print column and Web site focusing on new car reviews for women in general and mothers in particular; entertaining car reviews, too."

With lines like: "The strange placement and weird ergonomics of the parking break and gear shifting thingy (that's the technical term, by the way) throw me for a loop."

It is obvious Mother Proof is not for your typical gear-head. Mother Proof was born from the frustration of a mom looking for a new car.

Varela says, "My first step was to research them online; read car reviews - narrow down my choices that way. And I really couldn't find any information that was pertinent to me in my everyday life as a mom."

She found that the information in a typical car review (displacement – "Don't know what it is," she says - compression ratio -"Could care less," she says - horsepower –"Not interested," she says) isn't really important to mothers.