I think car purchasers are much more likely to be insane than car manufacturers. Cupholders seem like exactly the sort of thing that someone might forget to look into when purchasing a car, but it is one of the most common complaints due to constant daily interaction.
How many buyers do you think actually walk away from cars due to shoddy cupholders? I think the amount of complaining indicates that most people go on to buy cars and then complain.
I also think you're ignoring self-selection effects among complainers. A lot fewer people are qualified to complain about performance and gas mileage, but everyone gets annoyed by cupholders. This is probably related to why a sex scandal is much more devastating to a politician than decades of shitty policy choices.
I agree, and I think I found a Wikipedia article which supports your claim and references the effect you are referring to, so I'll link that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality
If people buy a car and then complain about it, that's bad press for the model, and hurts business.
Failing to model insane buyers is itself a failure of sanity in manufacturers.
This was my first reaction, too. I recall my car-buying experience consisting mostly of me trying to keep up with my impressions about seat-feel, head space, visibility, dash design, etc. and trying to somehow aggregate that information with numbers that I really didn't know how to process in the first place (e.g. safety ratings, scores from reviews, prices vs. upkeep costs). It wasn't until I'd pretty much picked out my car that I made an effort to mentally simulate a typical drive.
How I pattern-match this post:
"Here is an unsolved problem from a domain I hold no expertise in. The fact it is not solved suggests that not enough effort is being applied to it. More effort should be applied to it. I am somehow more clever than the people in this domain for noticing this. After all, how hard could it be?"
Experience teaches me that the base rate for holding and expressing this sentiment, and being correct about it, is incredibly low.
I don't disagree with you as such, but I don't see why you're saying this. Ground-breaking industry game-changers are highly available examples by their nature, but they're also far from typical examples.
Don't be so quick to jump to conclusions.
Including good cupholders isn't a trivial problem, at all. From silicone cushioning to automatic cup-locking, to lighting, to thermoplastic insets, to accommodating a vast range of different sizes, from coffee cups to super-gulp 1.5 liter monstrosities, the list goes on. Compare to: What is the optimal can size, and form? Seems easy enough, yet far from a "solved" or trivial problem.
There are immense safety issues: If they impede the driver in his normal operation of the car, the manufacturer could be liable to lawsuits. Mustn't impede airbags, even using the largest fitting cups, or liable for lawsuits. Must be secure from spilling (not only an issue for 4x4 offroaders, but also for normal cars on the occasional bumpy road, or going up and down a ramp), or liable for lawsuits.
There are people specifically responsible for designing cupholders, up to whole companies, in fact. I remember an article stating that there were man-years dedicated just to the cupholder for some specific car model.
Real estate in a car is at a premium, especially the easily accessible portion. Accommodating someone who wants 3 beverages within easy
Fellow European checking in, I can confirm that cup holders are disgraceful things that clutter up space because those overweight Americans just can't go for five minutes without ingesting water sweetened with corn syrup.
(we have an unobtrusive cup-holder between the backs of the front seats, I don't remember ever using it)
I don't think Europeans really think that about Americans, but I suspect a cup-holder, while convenient, might also give the car a bit of a subtle "low brow" feel that make people slightly less comfortable in spending large amounts of money on it. A bit like how a comfortable bike seat may be better and more comfortable by all metrics, but be shunned because comfortable seats are for pussies. And from a business perspective, if 1% of people complain about cup-holders (but buy anyway), and 10% of people subconsciously reduce the worth they give to a car because of cup-holders, then including cup-holders is a bad idea!
They pretty much don't exist. In my 50-odd years of living in the UK, I think I have seen a drive-through exactly once. (It's in a built-up area a mile or two from Heathrow Airport.) I have never seen one anywhere in Europe. And I rarely see drivers eat or drink while driving. In some circumstances, the police may even take the view that you are Driving Without Due Care and Attention.
I don't even know if my car has a cupholder. There's an odd-shaped recess near floor level, between and in front of the front seats, with no obvious function, but I have never had reason to put anything in it. A cupholder is not a thing it would even occur to me to look for when considering a new car.
ETA: Having just been in it, I can see that the "odd-shaped recess" is indeed a cupholder. One learns something every day.
Homer Simpson pointed this out in 1991.
Homer: All right, you eggheads! I want a place in this car to put my drink!
Engineer: Sir, the-the car has a beverage holder.
Homer: Hello! Hello, Einstein! I said a place to put my drink. You know those Super Slakers they sell at the Kwik-E-Mart? (Makes a large circle with his hands.) The cup is this big!
Incidentally, the biggest problem with the car Homer ends up designing is the price tag - it doesn't matter whether or not the "Homer Simpsons" of the world want the car if they can't afford to buy it. (I've read wise guys saying that Homer was probably more in touch with the car-buying public than the writers thought, claiming that Homer Simpson's design resembles the SUVs that started becoming popular in the U.S. in the 1990s.)
Just to add to the mystery, the people in charge of manufacturing presumably cared about cupholders themselves, and still didn't see the importance of the issue.
I put it a little too strongly, but if a high proportion of people have shown themselves to care about cupholders, it's plausible that a high proportion of car executives care about cupholders.
The LW memeplex may be somewhat too ready to buy into the hypothesis that a given group of people is insane. People do generally respond to incentives, and situations where there are large incentives that people aren't responding to are probably worth an explanation more descriptive than generic insanity.
Given what I understand to be the dominant stereotypes about American cars, though, I do think it's plausible that American car manufacturers are insane. I don't know about others.
Incentives? Which specific person gets fired because people are complaining about car cupholders? If the answer is "I can't point to anyone like that" then nobody has an incentive to fix car cupholders.
I'd bet at 4 to 1 that a VP who earned a manufacturer's economy line a reputation as "those cars with the awesome cupholders" would have a much clearer path to the C-suite; but it seems difficult to empirically test.
Who's going to give an auto designer any credit for a completely boring and obvious idea like "larger cupholders"? The incentives are almost certainly in the direction of affiliating oneself with higher-status design changes (satellite radio, integration with apps and Internet, etc) rather than lower-status ones.
There's a tendency (at least in this post's comments) to throw around the word "insane" as a synonym for "LW-style irrational". It does not mean what you think it means.
This is related to a common problem among certain types of engineers and scientists, which is to think of anything easy to do as not enough fun and hence beneath oneself. Heck, I have this problem sometimes.
My brother does relevant work for a big auto firm in Europe; I pointed him at this discussion and this was his commentary:
...Wow, a pretty long discusion in just 3 days and somehow it still manages to get back to "is apple really that clever?". I think most of the points were made - the centre console is the most valuable piece of real estate in a car, and two super-size McD cups take up a LOT of space. Then add in new European 0.33l slim cans (red bull design) which fall over in big cupholders and the problem gets quite tricky. Also what custome
Are you sure this is such a pervasive trend? All of the luxury cars I've ever been in have had good, if sometimes absurd (I'm looking at you, Porsche), cup-holders.
when I told my then 7 year old daughter that our new 4 seater with one cupholder cost more than her friends new Honda Odyssey with 3 rows of seats, electric doors, and a dvd player in the back, she thought I was the stupidest man on earth.
And boy, was she right.
I'm shopping for a car, and I've spent many hours this past month reading user reviews of cars. There are seven things American car buyers have cared and complained about consistently for at least the past ten years. In roughly decreasing importance:
Six of these things are complicated design trade-offs. For a good design, increasing any one of them makes most of the other five take a hit.
Cup-holders are not a complicated design trade-off. This should be a solved problem: Put two large, sturdy cup-holders somewhere accessible from the driver's seat. There is nothing to be gained from saving a few centimeters on cup-holder space that could be worth the millions of buyers who will walk away from a $50,000 car because they don't like its cup-holders.
Seriously, build the cup-holders first and design the rest of the interior around them. They're that important.
In the 1970s, no one had cup-holders or knew that they needed them. Things began changing in the 1980s, perhaps due to the expansion of Starbucks, perhaps due to the sudden increase in commute lengths. Today I like to have at least two and preferably three drinks with me for my 1-hour morning commute: A hot coffee to wake up, cold water for when I burn myself with the coffee, and a soda or tea for variety.
But car manufacturers were glacially slow to respond. I've been looking at used Jaguar XJs. These cars originally cost about $100,000 in today's money. Their owners complained continually about the cheap tiny plastic folding cup-holders that couldn't hold cups. They posted do-it-yourself fixes in online forums. Jaguar didn't even begin to address this until 2004, at least fifteen years into the cup-holder crisis, when they made the cup-holders slightly (but not much) less-crappy, and large enough to hold a small coffee (but not a medium).
Most new cars today finally have two cup-holders up front, and the collapsible cup-holders that enraged drivers for years by (predictably) collapsing are finally gone, but many cup-holders still aren't large enough to hold a Starbucks venti.
What the cup-holder paradox implies is that there are many multi-billion dollar care companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on product development every year without ever assigning a single summer intern to take one day to read some of the many thousands of user reviews available for free on cars.com, autotrader.com, and other websites. If they had, they'd have realized the depth of America's anger at shoddy cup-holders.
Or perhaps they read the reviews and dismiss them, because their customers are obviously morons who don't appreciate good auto design. Even today, auto manufacturers post photos of the interiors of all their new cars on their websites, but never in a dozen photos give you a clear view of the cup-holders, which makes me lean toward this view.
Or perhaps the cup-holders aren't even considered during design, but are added on at the last minute, because cars didn't used to have cup-holders at all and so that's not part of the design process. Perhaps automakers have internalized their process of producing and selling cars, and they can't conceive of adding a new element to that process, at least not until all the old automakers die out.
My priors say that it's more likely that I'm imagining the whole thing, that I selectively remember reviews complaining about cup-holders because of my own preferences, than that there has been a massive, systematic cognitive failure on the part of all the world's auto-makers, spanning 20 years, during which many of them somehow failed to observe, comprehend, or address this trivially-simple complaint of their customers, despite the billions of dollars at stake.
Am I?
How I pattern-match this post:
"Here is an unsolved problem from a domain I hold no expertise in. The fact it is not solved suggests that not enough effort is being applied to it. More effort should be applied to it. I am somehow more clever than the people in this domain for noticing this. After all, how hard could it be?"
Experience teaches me that the base rate for holding and expressing this sentiment, and being correct about it, is incredibly low.
That was why I made this post. My purpose is not to solve the cup-holder problem, but to ask whether such mistakes exist.
Designing a car is such a complicated process that there are many ways things could fall through the cracks. Such as final approval for designs being given in Japan or Europe, where people perhaps don't value cup-holders as highly.