A Shocking Amount of People Say Car Cupholders Are ‘Difficult to Use’

Date June 27, 2025
Category
News
A Shocking Amount of People Say Car Cupholders Are ‘Difficult to Use’

The consumer insight researchers at J.D. Power and Associates run an annual Initial Quality Survey (IQS) on new car buyers. It yields a comparative list of how satisfied people are with new cars from all of our market’s major brands. It also exposes features and trends that buyers like and don’t. And this year, one of the biggest jumps in car-owner complaints was about cupholders.

J.D. Power’s IQS press release lays it out like this:

“While it seemed like manufacturers had cupholders figured out, given that owners are now bringing more reusable containers into their vehicles, manufacturers are struggling to keep up with being able to accommodate all the different shapes and sizes that are increasingly available. Consequently, owners are again citing more problems in this area, with the expectation that their vehicle should be able to hold different sizes of containers.”

I got some more context for us on that from Frank Hanley, J.D. Power’s Senior Director, Auto Benchmarking. “When looking at the top 10 problems for the [industry] “cupholders – difficult to use” went from being the [seventh] most problematic issue for the vehicle to the [third] most reported this year,” he explained over email.

Third-most-problematic sounds high, no?

Climate controlled cupholders.
Climate-controlled cupholders seemed neat when we started seeing them years ago, but now that everybody’s coffee cup is insulated, the idea is kind of redundant. Adobe

Elaborating, Hanley added [sic]:

“In the survey we ask owners about 227 specific areas where they can report issues with their vehicles across 10 categories.  Owners also have the ability to write in any problems that are not listed.  Cup holders this year was the 3rd most reported of those 227 items.”

“Everything a customer does mark a problem we ask additional follow up questions that pertain to the issue including having them write in a comment.  When reading these comments it was clear that more customers are complaining about the cup holders not being able to hold the larger cup sizes being brought into the vehicles well like Yetis and Stanley mugs.  The larger cups are also intruding on access to other areas in the center tunnel like storage spaces and controls in the center stack depending on the positioning of the cup holders.”

As a lover of both old cars and giant coffee cups, I feel this pain deeply. Driving my 20-year-old manual-shift BMW with a drink in the center console is equally hilarious and annoying. But I’m a little surprised people are having this issue with new cars—a lot of the press loaners I’m in seem to accommodate cups well enough.

Or, maybe, is it possible that I just don’t have a big enough coffee cup?

It’s funny to think of product planners at car companies trying to track the next trend in travel mugs as they spec out center console cupholder designs. I remember talking to somebody at a German automaker years ago, with a question along the lines of “why aren’t the cupholders bigger,” and his frustration at the concept of cupholders at all was not well hidden. He said something like, “Why do you need to drink while you drive? Just stop at a cafe.” Trust, if I could spend my days sipping cappuccinos at roadside rest stops in Europe, that’s exactly where I’d be writing this from right now. But here in America, I have to drive 100 miles through the mud, uphill both ways, just to get my groceries. And I’m not about to sit anywhere for that long without a little coffee to suck on, goshdang it.

Jokes aside, I very much do like to sip a beverage while cruising, and a good cupholder does go a long way in interior ergonomics. So while it does sound silly that so many people would complain about something as trivial as beverage storage, I kind of get it. And I guess it’s good news that one of America’s biggest issues with their new cars could be solved by simply switching to a smaller cup?

As for automakers trying to keep up with cup trends, here’s a free pitch: Cupholder adapters.

Got a great or terrible cupholder situation in your car? I want to hear about it at andrew.collins@thedrive.com.

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