The dashboard cupholders on the i-MiEV are one of those unique features I find curiously charming, uniquely Japanese and eminently practical. I like having a place for a small beverage at eye level and not down near the shifter, where it’s more likely to get spilled. Since it’s a hot climate here and the air conditioning is on more than not, the cooling vents blowing onto anything holding a cold drink placed up there is actually an asset, so long as it’s not so tall of a container as to block too much of the airflow.
We have some of those brightly-colored kid-friendly small plastic juice cups in the kitchen and I quickly drafted a couple of them into service. The form factor was nearly ideal and they’re unbreakable, but I wanted to replace them with something a little more stylish that would always live in the car. Glass seemed too risky and fragile. Stainless steel is the obvious choice. So the search was on for something of that material that would fit those holders.
Also . . . after we got rid of our minivan and our son went off to college, my wife and I made a pact that her recently purchased Honda Fit wouldn’t become the next dining room on wheels. That also extends to big gulp soda cups or pop-top cans of the same, hot coffee and the like. And, needless to say, no open alcoholic beverages in the vehicles either, for all the obvious reasons beyond spillage.
After my 19 year odyssey with the Saturn, I had also grown tired of coffee-stained carpets, sticky beverage goo on the plastic parts and rotting French fries - or worse - trapped under the seats (much of it from carpooling kids, yes, but enough over the years that I’m also directly responsible for.) It was also going to be very different with the i-MiEV . . . especially since that car’s interior really is in mint condition. So, it’s only water (or plain soda water) that we now drink in our cars, and no open food to munch on until we get home or to another stationary destination. Period.
Back to the stainless steel cups . . . anything that I could find that was the right height invariably was too fat to fit the holders. Tapered cups (the one thing I didn’t like about the plastic ones I had been using) tended to rattle around and not really make the best use of the allotted space. Most of those were too tall anyway. What I was after was a non-tapered cylinder container in the neighborhood of 2.6” (66mm) in diameter by 4.8” (122mm) tall, or about the size of a standard 12oz. aluminum pop-top beverage can. After much searching, what I eventually found was this . . .
http://www.amazon.com/Zack-40081-Mirror-Tumbler-2-56-Inch/dp/B00A9T5AJ8
They’re gorgeous . . . polished metal that almost glows and with an authoritative heft to them. They wouldn’t look out of place inside a Tesla or in an Architectural Digest photo spread. But, yes, at $30 something a piece, they’re hideously overpriced by any stretch of the imagination. I was hoping to find something for about a tenth of this cost, but nothing out there seemed to have that “juuuust right” Goldilocks and The Three Bears form factor and size in stainless steel.
You can find these same cups on European web sites for far less, but the shipping to get them to the US is more expensive than the base price of the product! So I bit the bullet ended up getting two of them domestically on Amazon for the same price as the Euro purchase/shipping deal and they arrived at my front door a few days later.
No regrets going overboard on a couple of metal drinking cups for the car, though. Unlike the i-MiEV’s dedicated and overpriced Enasave tires, drinking cups don’t wear out or require replacing every 10 to 15 thousand miles. And, as you all know, the i-MiEV’s air conditioner is very good, chilling the tops of these metal cups quickly. I fill up my Klean Kanteen with ice water on the way out the door most mornings and I’ve got cold water to pour into stylish pre-cooled metal cups all day long and the car’s air conditioning keeps that way. Life is good, if somewhat uneconomical at times.