Driven to Drink
Cup holders are as American as baseball, apple pie and .45-caliber Smith & Wessons. They tap into our collective fascination with nifty gizmos and speak directly to the hyperactivity at the core of our national psyche. Hey, we’re a drive-through society living in a multitasking environment. When we hit the road, Jack, we’ve got a cell phone in one hand and a coffee mug in the other.
Americans may be more passionate about cup holders than they are about virtually any other part of their cars. Anti-lock brakes? That’s nice. Electronically controlled transmissions? Yeah, great. But cup holders . . . You don’t need a degree in mechanical engineering to understand them. Because when a steaming double decaf latte spills into a 400-watt stereo, that’s the kind of thing people get worked up over.
Although most car makers had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Cup Holder Age, they’ve gotten with the program with a vengeance. Four years ago, before the situation went ballistic, people accused Nissan of overkill when the Quest minivan debuted with 10 cup holders. Then, Chrysler raised the ante with 13 in its redesigned Caravan. Now comes Chevrolet with no fewer than 17--count ‘em, 17--cup holders in the new Venture minivan, prompting its general manager, John Middlebrook, to declare victory in the Cup Holder War: “Now maybe we can get on with our lives because this could get ridiculous.”
Too late, John. Way too late. We’ve already got slide-open cup holders, pop-up cup holders, cantilevered cup holders with polished aluminum bases, cup holders that resemble lobster claws, rectangular cup holders for juice boxes, cup holders heavy-duty enough to haul cherry Slurpees from Huntington Beach to Hyannisport, even cup holders that explode from the dashboard like the articulated arm on the space shuttle.
In their homely way, cup holders are the history of automobile design writ small. In the good old days, cars functioned as statements of purpose and declarations of style. Think tail fins and you’ll get the picture. Especially in Detroit, star billing went to exterior designers, while interior styling was the sleepy backwater where has-beens and never-would-bes hung out in those happy days before corporate downsizing.
These days, interior design takes a back seat to nobody. Sure, funky good looks are great, but what with gridlock and all the crazies on the road, buyers are more concerned about safety, comfort and ergonomics. Cars have become a cocoon where drivers escape from their husbands and wives and kids and bosses and the Liberal, Tax-Gouging Federal Government. Cup holders are a last, defiant cry of freedom: I’m the lord of my fiefdom, the master of my fate. If I want to suck down a six-pack of Mountain Dew on my way to work, it’s my own damn business.
The rest of the world just doesn’t get this whole cup holder thing. Techno-pragmatists that they are, Japanese auto makers have engineered some of the slickest cup holders on earth. (I keep imagining a roomful of Japanese guys in white lab coats examining a Big Gulp with tweezers and protractors.) On the streets of Tokyo, though, the Japanese take on cup holders is befuddlement. Japan is, after all, a country where grown men put white doilies on their headrests.
The Europeans are even worse. Stuck in a delusional time warp, they can’t shake the quaint notion that cars are built for driving, not drinking, much less eating, faxing or teenage groping. As far as they’re concerned, the American cup holder fetish merely confirms their profoundly held belief that the United States is a barbaric culture only one step removed from the Dark Ages. Until recently, in fact, German manufacturers categorically refused to degrade their ultimate driving machines with cup holders. Of course, these were the same geniuses who didn’t believe in air conditioning either.
To this day, cars designed specifically for the European market make no concessions to the concept of drinking while driving. But if you want to make a splash in the States, you’d better be packing plenty of cup holders. And why not? The cup holder is a perfect symbol for our melting-pot ethos, a molded-plastic metaphor for multiculturalism. It embodies the qualities that made America what it is today: Yankee ingenuity. Lateral thinking. The courage to look like a complete idiot. When I see a cup holder, I think: Is this a great country or what? Then I toss the empty in the back seat and continue on my merry way.
