What makes a car love? This is not the technology, these are the cup holders


Nearly 100,000 car Buyers of 2025 model year cars were asked what they think of their bright new rides. The results are to say the least. Do you want to know who the worst artist was? That ominous went to Audi, with an embarrassment of 269 problems per 100 vehicles.

However, one of the most interesting discoveries of the JD Power Initial Quality Study (marked as a ‘key finding’, no less), has no annoyance about the lack of physical buttons, nor, surprisingly, invasive bongs of speed-argument systems, but a clear increase in ‘cup-frustration’.

‘Although manufacturers seemed to have figured out cup holders … struggling manufacturers to keep up with the ability to accommodate all the different shapes and sizes [of containers] It is increasingly available, ”the report states.

It seems that many buyers, despite the obsession of the automotive industry with software-defined vehicles, would abandon a number of digital Doohickeys, as long as there was enough space in their new cars for multiple big gulpps. By paying the nose for a fancy new car filled with technology adas, surrounding lighting, rear seats, dog modes-time not car buyers to complain about insufficient expandable liquor bays.

This prolonged annual benchmark report advised a few years to take a closer look at car brands to the cup holder Kvetching. The cylindrical gaps of the space or in some cars, knockout trays, spaces, fancy holsters or hinge bags are still too small, and grab lots of the question. Too small for what, yet? Gargantuan Stanley Cups, the giant Yeti Gallon ramblers and similar such bladder busters, of which the spilled content can drench a desert in flower.

Although the center console is real estate in contemporary cars at a premium-especially now that the increasing touch screens have apparently become essential in every self-respecting digital cabin-the-big-drink culture of the Middle East and Australia states that car manufacturers do not look at the cup storage.

These are the little things

Twenty years ago, a PricewaterhouseCoopers report suggested that the number of cup holders in a US vehicle was one of the most important factors to make the purchase decision for potential car buyers. That it remains just as necessary today should arrange with car software engineers today, but it does not surprise Chris Fischer, Nissan’s cup holders engineer. “That cup holders work well is important for customer satisfaction,” Fischer tells Wired. “It’s a key decision when you buy a car.”

Fischer, who worked on Nissan’s North American Technical Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, is the company’s senior driver of vehicle performance development, and with a team “Cabin Utility” engineers, he worked to improve the storage of drink in the car since 2015, when Nissan.

The design of cup containers is very important for many consumers, he says. “If they are angry about a point of contact every day, it will be their desire to want this vehicle again.”

“Touch points are critical,” Dick Powell, co-founder of London headquartered design and innovation business Seymourpowell. ‘Big design is fundamental about making things better, and when you go into a car displeasure room, the points of contact are the first interaction you have by car. How do it do the [door] Handle feels? What is it like to open the door? Where are the cup holders? “

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