Let’s Remember The Half-Ass Larval Cup ‘Holders’ On Glove Box Doors: Cold Start

Cup holders are, at this point in human cultural development, pretty ubiquitous in cars. We accept that cars will be crammed full of these cylindrical cavities, which we will then happy fill with cylindrical volumes of liquid, constrained to that shape by a thin paper shell. Then, we pour those liquids down our alimentary canals, where our kidneys eventually process the liquid into urine, which we eject from our urethras, and the cycle begins anew.

But! Even before we took drink holders for granted in our cars, we still had the desire to drink liquids, and our cars had a sort of half-ass solution for this: little round depressions on the inside of the glove box door.

I’ve always been fascinated by these because they seem like the absolute least amount of effort and thought one could expend to attempt to find a “solution” to this problem. You know the kind I’m talking about. These:

A huge number of cars from the, let’s see 1940s to 1990s, maybe into the early 2000s, had, on the inside of their glove box doors, between one and three of these little depressions, perfect for precariously holding a cup of liquid safely at speeds of up to and including zero mph, give or take zero mph.

I mean, I get why they exist; things like drive-throughs made eating in your car A Thing in the 1950s and on, and to use those your car would be stationary, at least ideally.

And the glove box door is an ideal little flip-down table area. In a stationary car, even a flat glove box door would have worked fine for holding a drink, since gravity is generally always available to help pin that drink down to the glove box door. And that always makes me wonder what these little depressions are for, really?

They suggest where you can or should place your drink, though in doing so, they limit where that drink can go, since if you don’t get them exactly in the shallow round divot, they’ll tip over. Some can be just deep enough to give the very false illusion that they could hold a drink if the car is in motion, which they very much can’t.

They’re a token gesture, and they hint at what could work – find someplace and make deeper holes and you’ve basically got a real cupholder – but they don’t actually go that far.

It’s not like people didn’t have the need for real cupholder before the Modern Era – they did, and there were all sorts of attempts to add cupholders, like this questionable 1953 design that just kind of crammed in between the seat bottom and backrest:

“Article holder” is a great non-committal name, too, in case you’d rather put other cylindrical things in there, like cans of peas or some big capacitors. Also, is that midde part for a pack of smokes?

Companies that stood to gain from you drinking things while you drove stepped up, too, like this McDonald’s-branded door-hanging drink holder that was a free giveaway:

Those door-hanging cupholders weren’t great, but they were a hell of a lot better than those shallow little circular depressions that just kind of teased cupholder-dom.

There was one glove-box-door-based cupholder solution that wasn’t garbage, though. Sure, it required special cups, but the whole thing was so elegant and lovely I can’t fault it for that. It was, of course, the 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham glove box mini-bar setup:

Magnetic tumblers! Shiny chrome and elegant little bottles of booze! Easily the classiest way to drink and drive ever.