A patent filed in January 1970 for a dashboard drink holder, an early ancestor of the car cupholder, also covered a coin dispenser and a way to attach a tissue dispenser and litter bags. The patent office granted U.S. Patent 3,606,112 to Leonard A. Cheshier of Dallas on Sept. 20, 1971, for a retractable beverage holder: a telescoping frame that attached to the instrument panel and retracted beneath it.
Starbucks says its holiday menu arrives Nov. 5, and its Cold Brew page lists four sizes: Tall at 12 fluid ounces, Grande at 16, Venti at 24 and Trenta at 30. That is a 2.5-to-1 spread in volume, and every holder in your car has to take whichever one you walk out with. Thirty ounces of anything water-like weighs about two pounds before you add the cup and lid (The Auto Wire’s math, not Starbucks’s). The cup is the variable, and 55 years of patents have been arguing with it.
Two complaints that keep showing up in patents
A Prince Corp. patent filed May 11, 1987, and granted July 12, 1988, lays out what its inventors, Ronald A. Dykstra and Carl W. Flowerday, disliked about existing holders. Armrest recesses gathered dirt that was hard to clean out because the floor of the recess was deep and hard to reach. Holders on glove-compartment doors gave a drink little support, so a bump could spill it. Their holder grips the container on its sides and bottom.
Dror Levy filed a different fix on July 5, 1994, and it was granted Feb. 6, 1996. His filing says earlier holders were limited to a few specific locations and had no gimbal. A gimbal is a pivoted mount: it lets the holder swing as the car brakes and turns, so the cup stays upright while the car moves around it. Levy’s design was meant to fit in several places in a car and to keep the container level, with the pivoting parts minimizing spills.
Detroit’s answer was an adjustable holder
Stellantis’s timeline of Chrysler minivan innovations lists adjustable cup holders in its 1996 entry for the third-generation, cab-forward NS minivans, and center floor consoles with four cup holders in any price class in its 2017 entry. Adjustable is an admission that the cup is the variable. A holder is molded into the car years before anyone designs the drink that will sit in it.
Minivans carry the most passengers and so the most cups, which makes them the hardest test of that bargain.
What to check on a test drive
Bring a cup. Neither the Starbucks menu page nor the Stellantis timeline gives a cup diameter, so there is no spec-sheet number to compare. The test is physical: whether a Venti sits upright without its lid tilting into the console, whether the holder adjusts, and whether you can pull the cup out with one hand. The 1988 dirt complaint still applies, too. A deep recess you cannot reach to wipe out is where sticky residue collects.
What’s the one cup your car’s holder flat-out refuses, and what do you do with it?