The Chicago Auto Show offered plenty of thrills for gearheads, but nothing quite compared with the sheer exhilaration of sitting in the driver’s seat of the 2003 Saab 9-5 sedan and playing with the cupholder.
Push a button on the dash and, with a satisfying pneumatic swoosh, out pops a spiderlike appendage that assembles itself into a suitable receptacle for your coffee cup.
Push the holder back in and the whole thing somehow collapses in on itself and disappears back into the dash. It is a marvel of engineering.
Out, in. Out, in.
You could do this for hours.
There’s a lot of high-tech wizardry going into making cars these days, from on-board navigation systems to built-in DVD players–not to mention the precision machinery under the hood. Then there’s the debate raging over the geopolitics of SUV ownership. But it’s the humble cupholder that still manages to alternately vex and inspire both Detroit and the car-buying public.
According to J.D. Power and Associates, inadequate cupholders constituted the second most common complaint of new-car buyers last year when it comes to interior features and controls (windshield wipers were ranked first).
Given their mundane function, the time, energy and craftsmanship that go into creating the cupholder–particularly the “articulating” variety with moving parts–are astounding. In most cases, the designers are given a vanishingly small portion of the dash to work with. (In the case of the Saab 9-5, the car’s Swedish designers had left a quarter-inch slot in the dash for CD storage before realizing that they’d forgotten a cupholder–Europeans frown on drinking anything while driving–and told the design firm Collins & Aikman, which builds interior components for car manufacturers, to make it work.)
“You have to get really creative,” said Keith Riha, a design executive with the firm.
Collins & Aikman’s designers use sophisticated computer-assisted design software–not unlike the software that architect Frank Gehry uses to design his soaring, twisted buildings–to come up with various complicated cupholder models.
Once they settle on a prototype for a given car, they get to work on making sure it is fun to play with.
“We’ll measure the sound it makes when it opens and closes,” said Riha, “and how long it takes to open and close,” and adjust it accordingly.
Something that simply pops right out of the dash in a jumble of plastic would be tacky and cheap, so the firm uses what Riha calls “viscous dampening” to slow down the opening and closing process, giving it a futuristic, motor-driven feel.
Precision engineering
Riha goes for a smooth and quiet cupholder, but he makes sure that it makes a little noise, because “the customer has to know when it closes that it has closed and latched.”
The gizmo cupholder camp even goes so far as to customize the speed with which a cupholder opens to the target demographic of the car model.
Riha’s team, for instance, designed the cupholder for the Dodge Ram, which is essentially a second glovebox that pops out from the middle of the dash and can hold enormous drinks. Your average Ram owner, believe it or not, actually has an opinion on the velocity with which his cupholder opens.
“The Ram cupholder is a big heavy thing,” said Riha, “and he’s expecting it to come out in a robust, masculine manner. Whereas the Audi, say, that’s for a smaller coffee cup, and he’s expecting something more dainty and elegant.”
Other drivers would settle for anything at all.
“I drive a Nissan 300ZX sports car,” said Mickey Kaus, a political columnist for the online magazine Slate who also maintains a Web log devoted to reviewing new cars, via e-mail.
“It has no cupholders,” said Kaus. “It has a manual shift. I also love coffee. You can figure out the rest. When I’m passing the hot cup from hand to hand while steering with my knees and shifting with my elbow, there is actually a moment when it makes sense to sell my car, which I love, solely because it doesn’t have a cupholder. Also, a cupholder would, at that point, be a greater safety feature than an airbag.”
Although Kaus’ predicament is increasingly rare–most mass-market car manufacturers have caught on–many drivers can sympathize with the frustrations of a poorly placed or insufficiently stable cupholder.
And they tend to let people know about it.
“It’s funny,” said John Weiner, national product planning manager for Lexus. “Cupholders have traditionally been one of the things that customers will–very loudly–tell you about if they have a problem.”
As recently as two years ago, Dave Spykerman, an engineering manager for Johnson Controls Inc., a Milwaukee-based automotive supplier, told this newspaper that the pursuit of the perfect cupholder–one that will hold a supersized Coke as well as it will a tall skim latte–was “the Holy Grail” of the industry. But in recent years, engineers have come to terms with the fact that you can’t please everyone, and that search has largely been called off.
Elusive ideal
“There is no ideal cupholder,” sighed Riha. “[Carmakers] have been pushing for the past five or six years to accommodate every size cup. It’s amazing how big these 7-Elevens and McDonald’s will let their cups get–it’s very challenging.”
Car designers have met that challenge by engineering a given model’s cupholder specifically for that model’s key demographic–putting the Big Gulp cupholders in the kind of car that Big Gulp drinkers buy.
“When we design a Ford Focus, we really take into account those 20-ounce pop bottles, because that’s what Focus buyers are drinking,” said Terence Duncan, a design manager for Ford Motor Co. “For a Taurus, which is often used by business travelers, we’re accommodating hot beverages.”
Similarly, a Lexus spokeswoman points out that the cupholders that shoot out of the LS sedan’s dash were specifically designed to accommodate a perceived proclivity on the part of Lexus owners for Starbucks coffee.
There are two competing schools of thought in Detroit’s cupholder brain trust–those who advocate the traditional circular slot built into the console between the seats, and the adventurous minds behind the highly stylized contraptions that, as in the Saab 9-5, spring forward in an elegant dance from the dash.
Ford’s Duncan calls it the “cupholder as gizmo versus cupholder as static thing” debate.
Despite confessing admiration for the gizmos, Duncan is squarely in the hole-in-the-floor camp.
“All of our research,” he said, “indicates that the gizmo cupholder is not a better cupholder.” Moving parts tend to break, he said, and because the cups are suspended in the air in front of the dash, coffee spills are likely to run down the radio or other electronic components. Besides, most drivers like to have a hole handy.
“Most of the time cupholders are not holding cups,” he said. “They’re holding pens or coins or Altoids,” something the gizmos can’t do.
“We have executives at Ford who say, `Your cupholders are boring–you’ve got to get better cupholders,'” he said. “And we propose one of those cool articulating ones, and then marketing comes back and says, `That’s not what the customers want.'”
And yet, the gizmo has its own charms.
The fun factor
“Some of these cupholders,” said Don Norman, a Northwestern University computer science professor and author of “The Design of Everyday Things,” “they’re not just there to hold the cup. They’re fun to push in and out. I’ve been in a car and people say, `Let me show you this.'”
All the emphasis on cupholders has, on average, paid off for most automakers. “There are certainly customers out there,” said Don Clark, a Chrysler engineer who holds the unofficial title of “cupholder czar,” “who would reject a car if it had the wrong cupholder. I’ve talked to them.”
Not everybody has caught on. J.D. Power and Associates began asking car buyers to rate their car’s cupholders for location, number and adjustability to different beverage sizes in 1997, and the average ratings for all cars have increased a scant 3 percent since then.
At the Chicago Auto Show, for instance, one spectator slid into the driver’s seat of a new $29,950 Jaguar X-type sedan, where he was confronted by supple leather seats and maple veneer.
As his companion in the passenger seat gushed about the luxury car’s trimmings, the driver said, “Yeah, but there’s only one cupholder.”
The antipathy runneth over
Here’s what some Q staffers had to say about their cupholders:
It probably isn’t right to worship a car, but I do love my 1998 Subaru Forester–except for one thing. The cupholder traps my drink in a thermal conflict. Whatever rests in the cupholder is right in front of a heating/air-conditioning vent.
So in summer, my hot coffee quickly becomes air-conditioned, and in winter, my ice-cold pop turns watery and warm. I’d say the crotch is a better choice, but then the drink can end up, eh, on the rocks.
–Ross Werland
In the 1994 model year for Acura Integras, it seemed pretty cool to have a hidden cupholder that, when pressed, pops out, ready to use only when needed.
Turns out there’s so little room for it to pop out to (between the radio and the floor-mounted gear shift) that to use the cupholder you must first create more space by taking the car out of park and turn the radio on because your drink will block the dials.
Fortunately, the important parts of this car are better designed; it’s just starting its second 100,000 miles.
–Nancy Watkins
In my 1998 Nissan Sentra, the cupholders are right below the radio/CD player. If you have anything taller than a 12-ounce can, the radio/CD player is obscured to some degree (if you have a passenger and you both have large drinks, everything is obscured). You can’t get to the buttons to switch stations.
What’s worse, if you hit a bump, the cup hits the “repeat” button and you get to hear one song endlessly.
–William Hageman
