First, let’s just get this out of the way. I know this is a cliché. Like you, I’ve seen all the videos of supercuts of infomercials of people not being able to hold a bowl of popcorn and a thought at the same time, or attempting to open a jar of olives with their nostrils, or not understanding how socks work or whatever. I know it’s a cliché, I know it’s hack, I know I should have risen above it decades ago. I know all this. It’s possible I’ve embroidered this very thought on a throw pillow. And still, somehow, when this incessant online infomercial for some sort of car cupholder has been appearing in my various social media feeds approximately eleventeen snacktillion times every day, I’m right back there, an old man screaming at a big furniture-looking CRT television about how everyone is so stupid, they’re all a pack of idiots, and wondering what the hell do they take me for?
I can’t believe I let this happen to me. And yet I did. Because every time I see this fucking ad for some fucking cupholder that I am in no fucking way going to fucking link to on my own fucking website, I get incensed at the stupidity of it all.
What am I so incensed at? It’s how the ad starts. It’s this:
Look, I know this is just archetypal brain-dead-human-in-infomercial behavior. I know. I know it shouldn’t bother me. But the gall, the fucking gall it takes to try and convince me of the value of cupholders – something I’m pretty sure most people have been well-acquainted with for a solid three or four decades at least – by having some hapless actor portray a human being so dazzlingly unfamiliar with liquids, cups, surfaces, friction, physics. gravity, pretty much every basic tenet of existing as a human in physical space so that I’ll think, garsh, I sure wish there was some way to prevent this tragic loss of, uh, milk?
I hate it. This is not a problem. Nobody puts a full, lidless cup on the angled part of their dashboard, a full arm’s reach away, and expects any outcome other than the one shown here. It doesn’t happen. And yet this company that makes –what, I don’t even know what, some kind of cupholder that goes in your cupholder?– this fucking company expects me to see this and then decide to give them money for something?
Fuck you, cupholder company that I will not name or link to.
Does this actually work? Is it done for comic effect? Maybe? Maybe it is. Maybe I’m getting worked up over nothing. I mean, nothing else in the ad is played for laughs, but maybe at this point in civilization it doesn’t need to be. Maybe they’re in on the joke?
Maybe. But it’s a tired fucking joke, and I’m still not convinced they mean it tongue-in-cheek.
I think this ad was filmed in China, because those quilted full floor mats are very popular there. I really like those, actually, and ordered some for the old minivan I have. They’re classy as hell. They deserve better than to be caught up and debased in such a grotesque manner for something like this.
I know some of you will say something like “yeah, but you’re talking about it,” to which I’d ask am I? Am I really? I’ve given no names, no links, nothing like that, and every time I see this on my timelines, which is, again, about once every picosecond, I scroll right past, annoyed. I couldn’t tell you the name of the product because I’ve never stayed long enough to see it.
I’m sorry to drag you into all this. I’m sorry to hold you down and scream profanity at you over something so inane. But I just felt that if I saw this one more time and didn’t get it out of my system, I’d explode. And I don’t want to do that.
I feel a little better now. Thank you. And don’t but whatever the fuck these clowns are selling, I don’t care if it’s a cupholder that fellates/cunnilingizes you while you drive.
My dad, being who he was, built a centre console for our 1972 Ford Ranch Wagon (police package) out of apiece of sheet metal and the thinnest plywood ever. He spray painted it black with Tremclad (Canada’s Rustoleum) and it was sized perfectly to hold his and my mother’s matching brown Thermoses. He would then put his uncovered cup of delicious Blue Ribbon coffee on the nice, flat dash above the speedometer.
But then, he upped his game! While he could easily rest his Thermos cup on the dash of the Ranch Wagon, he could not on the dash of our 1979 LTD Wagon (notice the theme in his car buying?). So, he got out the thin plywood again and made a tiny table that hooked into the defroster vents on the LTD’s dash, and kept his coffee nice and level.
Now if only he could have kept that LTD’s damned variable venturi carb working right…
I had one of those variable venturi carbs on a 1979 Mustang V6. What a piece of crap. Eventually, my mechanic replaced with a standard carbonator.
3 Fords in a row with those damned things. The 79 LTD, the 84 Crown Vic Police package, and the 88 Country Squire.
Hmmm…what was that definition of insanity again?
Did I miss a past article on the history of car cup holders or is one coming soon?
Not until he’s run out of taillight material.
I wonder what the last car non-supercar produced without a cupholder was. I had a 1995 BMW e34 without one. I had to buy one of those weird coffee cups with the suuuuper wide bottom.
Possibly the pre-facelift Cherokees? That was through 1996. (although there’s an optional add-on you can buy from Mopar)
“Oh no!”
You know the voice and the inflection.
“Oh nooo, stepbrother!”
“CUT!”
“Wrong video?”
“Wrong video.”
So so wrong. On so many levels.
Actually, I don’t get cupholders. I have no use for them. I never drink while driving, unless someone (usually my wife) hands me a bottle to take a sip of, and even that is very rare. If I want to eat or drink, the best idea is to find a rest area to stop at.
Uhhhhh…..wha? Apparently you:
Pick all that apply.
Technically correct. It never gets over 75 °C here. But you mean 24 °C, and it does get warmer than that.No.For longer trips, usually autobahns which rest areas, yes. Even non-autobahn highways in Germany usually have rest areas.No.No. :-)Usually my wife, who as she is not driving does not need a cupholder, as the water is in a bottle that has a cap, will drink a sip of water herself, and ask me if i also want some. Sometimes i say yes.We do have a dishwasher. We have had one since we moved in together. I insisted on that because my wife never, ever does dishes, never has, never will. Even before we moved in together, I would do her dishes when I came to visit.
Cupholders are for people who want/need to have something to drink while driving. Do you get it now?
I don’t get why you would want to drink while you drive.
Do you ever drive for 4-5 hour stretches and like … want to take a sip of water during that time? Or get up at 4am to drive an hour to the airport and want to take a cup of coffee with you?
This such a bizarre thing to pretend to be confused about. “Why human want liquid?” I can’t. Good day, sir.
I want liquid, but not while I am driving. I stop driving, eat and drink something, maybe use the toilet if a usable one is available, and then continue.
And I manage the one-hour drive to the airport (correct, it’s about an hour) without drinking something. I actually need both hands during that hour to drive safely.
You’re going to have to face it: you’re going to be in the minority on this point.
Counterpoint: even if I’m on a 5 minute drive… if I bring a water bottle with me to enjoy at my destination, it’s still better to have a holder designed for it instead of it rolling around on the passenger seat.
I know I am in the minority. The water bottle is in a bag, together with other things I may need to enjoy my destination, so it doesn’t roll around. That would indeed by irritating.
That’s great that is your line of reasoning but it is not one that the majority of people think about. I love cupholders because I leave a bottle of water in the door ones for passengers or myself if I happen to get bad dry mouth from my medication.
What a weird hill to die on.
I mean, I think that Subaru SUV that has like 19 cupholders for 8 seats is ridiculous, but that’s not the same conversation.
Like 10 years ago, I watched one of those “Police Pursuit” TV shows on TV. It was from the UK. The narrator kept saying the criminal was DRINKING AND DRIVING, and I thought, “oh no, alcohol, that’s shameful!” But no, he was just drinking a soda.
Yeah I don’t understand it. Like you have never wanted a swig of water in the car? It is bizarre to me to care about that so much. Especially if you were to break down. I live in the desert and having water in the car is a necessary thing. Like I am not becoming one of those moron unprepared fools you see on the news.
If course we have water in the car when we go on longer drives (I see “we” because I hardly ever drive long distances alone). How would I eat and drink at a rest area with no food or water? (Yes, there are rest areas that have kiosks, but it’s the exception rather than the rule)
It’s not just the cars. Us Americans must be constantly hydrated with freedumb juice at all times, which is why we had a Yeti fad followed by a Stanley fad.
If I don’t have constant and convenient access to my beverage of choice, the terrorists win.
Herr Ibert, you have stumbled into one of the very sacred areas of American Freedumb: The Right to Be Constantly Hydrated.
Actuallly, it’s different than that, because mere Hydration isn’t the goal here. No, the goal is the Constant Pursuit of Satisfaction Through Consumption, whether it is an ‘energy’ drink full of chemicals, a ‘starbucks’ designed and crafted to express one’s individual manifestation, or in my case, a damn McDonald’s large HiC orange
That is an existentially deep comment for an article about a cupholder informercial. This is why I love The Autopian.
In addition to all the wonderful answers others have given you, even if it’s not necessary to have a drink while driving, and I agree that most of the time it’s not, cup holders are useful. I store a can of spray-on sunscreen in my cupholder just in case I unexpectedly end up outdoors without a hat. My bald head is happier when it’s not burnt.
I thought it was an ad for those fancy floor mats that are taking over motor sports that used to have that deer caught in headlights looking woman in all the ads.
When I see infomercials like that, I think of two things:
1) Before I had kids: “There is no way a functional human being would be so uncoordinated to make that kind of mess/mistake”.
2) After I had kids: “Man, I wish my kids would make that little of a mess/mistake. Maybe I should get one of those on the off chance it would make my life easier…”
Seriously. My kids spill milk like that all the time, only they can somehow make a mess twice that size with half the amount of fluid.
The person who came up with “There’s no use crying over split milk” never had a child spill 8oz of milk behind the couch.
As someone who had a jug of milk leak in their brand new car I am of the opinion that no one, not even kids gets milk in the car. Too damn risky.
Knew someone who was an executive at the local (and surprisingly large) Jaguar dealership and had a really nice Jaguar sedan with leather upholstery that was fancy even by Jaguar standards. One time one of their kids spilled an entire super-size DQ Blizzard in the backseat when they were well underway on a road trip while they were on the highway. By the time they found a highway exit and pulled over so much of the Blizzard had soaked into the backseat that their best efforts at cleaning up were in vain and they were too far into the road trip to go back home. When they finally got back home the executive had the Jaguar extensively and thoroughly cleaned by the dealership’s professional detailers but the Jaguar still reeked of spoilt milk for years afterwards, especially on hot and humid days (which were, alas, all too frequent around here.) So, yeah, an eminently good rule, not ever having anything dairy-based in the car. One time one of my kids lost a large container of apple juice under the seats in my car; at the time we were living in an area that routinely saw 100-115-degree heat in the summertime so the container of apple juice eventually exploded, egad. I did my best to clean up (as a SAHP with kids and a spouse in grad school I didn’t have the means for professional detailing) but since the climate was typically arid it wasn’t such a big deal. When we moved to a humid climate there would still be the occasional whiff of apple juice on especially hot days. Actually not unpleasant. (Whereas that hapless Jaguar was simply unbearable on such days.) So, again, yeah, always a good idea to have nothing dairy-based at all in any car.
We won’t get into how long it took to break my wife’s habit of setting various open drink containers on the center console (aka. armrest) of the car when she’d get in the passenger seat only for me to get in the driver’s seat and immediately spill the drink when I put my arm on the armrest to put the car into drive…
I should note that the offending container would be within about 6″ of TWO cupholders…
I mean, have we talked before my first cup of coffee?
“…those quilted full floor mats… I really like those, actually, and ordered some for the old minivan I have.”
Way to bury the lede! Minivan update? Enquiring minds want to know!
I think this legit could happen in these modern times.
We’ve had cup holders – galore! – for so long now, there is an entire generation of vehicle occupants that was raised while never failing to have their cup lovingly held fast no matter where they set it down in a vehicle.
Cup holder counts in many family haulers have been well into the teens!
Surely there couldn’t be a surface that won’t hold a cup? Could there? they think …
Hey, you already told us about cupholder felatio! https://jalopnik.com/this-blowjob-machine-designed-for-teslas-on-autopilot-i-1844296987
The weird thing is that the subject car looks like a Mk VII Golf or some derivative, with perfectly decent cup holders just out of the frame behind the gear selector. They should have used a car without cupholders, a gigantic cup, or both.
Hey I’d be willing to click the link if it was actually a functional cupholder that I could somehow install in my 1985 Ford LTD. The cheapo aftermarket cupholder I have that hangs off the window edge ain’t cutting it.
Oh, man. Childhood memories triggered right there. I definitely had a few of those just a hair too wide or a smidge too narrow for some cars I was party to as a youth, and cleaned up many a spilled Big Gulp.
Shoulda Bedazzled it on a sweatshirt so you’d have something to wear on a fancy night out with Madame Torch.
Another wonderful look behind the curtain at the Wizard of Autopian. Let the rage flow through you.
On that note I would like to air a grevience of mine about the new Santa Fe. A neighbor has an all black, with the high gloss plastic wheel well trim. The plastic is so thin, and being high gloss it shows every imperfection in the sun light. You can see the form lines in the back through it. I’ve heard MH say Hyundai figured out that good design can be cheap, but in this case they went too cheap on manufacturing. The Santa Fe with the matte trim does not have this issue.
Sorry if I ruin this car, cause once you see it, you can’t not.
What I’ve heard, in many cases, is that a lot of infomercial products are made for certain disabilities, but it’s more “palatable” for audiences to see a “clumsy” person than a disabled person.
For example, a spoon with some kind of gyro mechanism in it to stay level? Ludicrous to show an adult human who can’t use a spoon, but when you imagine it’s for a person with Parkinson’s, suddenly it makes sense.
I don’t know what the cupholder product is, but I imagine similar could apply to the actual product.
“a big furniture-looking CRT television”
Lol. More than a couple decades ago my ginormous (at the time) old Zenith, with a carcase made of both genuine wood and particleboard clad in woodgrain contact paper, which I had inherited from my grandma, finally gave up the ghost after some three decades of faithful daily service. So I removed the defunct cathode ray tube, put in a shelf for a VCR and a Blu-ray/streaming device, and put a newer TV (originally a smaller CRT set and now a medium-sized flatscreen set) on top of the Zenith since it’s actually such a lovely example of late mid-century design. A win-win, retaining what’s basically a family heirloom, ha, and having a free and highly useful TV stand (especially since the living room has so much fenestration that mounting a flatscreen TV on the wall was not an option.)
When I was a kid, we had a CRT TV that had about a 20″ screen and was probably 6′ wide and 2.5′ tall. It’s long gone and the cabinet wasn’t of a particularly nice design, but if it were, it might have been cool to repurpose/modernize it. Could fit a large modern TV, stereo, and probably a minibar in the thing!
I have a smaller Magnavox Midcentury radio cabinet I completely did over. It was gutted and kind of beat up, being thrown out after the old guy next door died. I rebuilt it, replaced the broken legs with taller ones of the same style, new speaker cloth, paint, rebuilt the rear (just a panel of luan) with slats of maple to match the front with stainless steel speedboat vents in place of the front’s speakers, and modern electronics in it with a hidden RF receiver for a remote. Everyone comments on it and loves it and it was a lot of fun to do. I can’t say the sound is incredible or anything (neither is the hardware I used, though it’s not bad), but it retains a little of that old radio sound, which I attribute to the acoustics, which I really like.
*whistles* woooee, we don’t usually see this level of fenestration outside a proper clerestory!
That’s a super cool way to repurpose it, too!
25 or so years ago I wound up with an old tv cabinet with the tube and associated electronics already removed. I put hinges on the top and built a platform on the bottom and put a fishtank inside. Never actually filled it with water or fish. Just one of my many incomplete projects.
Now I’m wishing I’d just built shelves. It would’ve made a good place for the PlayStation and cable box etc. I could look for one and probably make it look decent, or at least way better than I would have back then but I also really have no need for yet another tv stand.
I kind of would like it if TV cabinets came back – for one thing, flat screens just aren’t thick enough to fit decent speakers, necessitating a separate sound bar – but it would be nice to have the whole TV blend into the room instead of just being that big black plastic rectangle.
“But I just felt that if I saw this one more time and didn’t get it out of my system, I’d explode. And I don’t want to do that.”
Yeah, you’ve already exploded with that aortic dissection so that’s good to get that out of your system, as goodness knows you don’t need another explosion. That infomercial is indeed somehow singularly infuriating, I just skip right over it every damn time.
Snacktillion!!! Awesome…these are some of the best articles too since they’re so fucking hilarious
Remember the wide base/narrow top, rubber bottom plastic travel mugs from the 70/80s meant so you could put them on top of the dash. Often times they were branded and given away (I think we had a AAA red one)
Of course vehicles back then had very flat topped dashboards and minimal cup holders so this made sense at the time.
Oh, we had ceramic mugs like those.
Boy were they were fun to drink from when they were half full – first nothing, then SPLASH!!!
Oh man, you just unlocked a core memory. My mom had one for years, and it damn near occupied a square foot of space at the base. She always seemed to have overfilled it; though it never spilled for tipping, it was ever splashing out the top anyway.
My old BMW didn’t have cupholders, so I got one of those from eBay. I even got a ceramic BMW branded one.
It literally broke in my hands while washing it.
Don’t be silly, of course a cup holder won’t service you in an oral fashion, that’s a cup bearer’s job.
Bestie – “My ear hurts”
Me – “Too much aural sex last nite?”
Infomercials are like spam. If they didn’t work, they wouldn’t exist. Therefore, because they exist, it means they must work.
I’ll raise you one bible.
For all the prowess of the Great Firewall, it seemed to be incapable of withstanding American Weapons-Grade Stupidity (TM).
I had a rental car in Germany many moons ago that lacked cupholders. My German colleagues laughed and informed me that I shouldn’t have a need for a cup of coffee in the car, as I should purely focus on driving rather than worrying if I might spill my beverage
Fast forward a few years, and all my German rental cars had useable cupholders. My German colleagues blamed America for ruining their cars with cupholders.
I was amazed that even by the ’90s, they still often didn’t. My 911 doesn’t have them. Hell, it doesn’t even have a center console.
To be fair, you used to be able to drive so fast in Germany that your cup of coffee wouldn’t have cooled enough to drink it before you reached your destination.
They have cupholders now, but the Germans were pretty passive aggressive about it. “OK, we’ll give you some cupholders, they’re gonna suck though lmao”. Our 7 passenger Q7 has 6 cupholders and they’re all small and shallow, and the ones in front are poorly placed. They’re bureaucratic, box ticking cupholders. I wonder what the world would be like if the Germans designed cupholders with the same ferver with which they design timing systems. The interior might look a bit like an M.C. Escher drawing.
If the Germans went all-in on cupholders I envision some type of amaze-balls, self-leveling device that would never ever allow the spillage a drop of anything when working correctly. There would be read-outs on the dash describing the angle your beverage is sitting at, a freshness meter, and of course it would maintain whatever temperature you desired. However, there would also be 34 related points of failure and one of those would be the camshaft for some damn reason.
Reminds of the afterthought cupholder that was added to the Mini Cooper.
But, you don’t have to worry about spilling your beverage if there’s a secure cupholder to put it in, its more of a distraction to have to hold it in your lap or drive one handed. Unless they mean stop to drink, but who the hell has time for that?
Dudes with heart conditions need Adblock Plus.
I find ublock origin works far better, especially after enabling the “Block Outsider Intrusion into LAN” option. i.e. websites can’t port scan your local network to fingerprint you
I used to use both, but an update made a conflict. now privacy badger+adblock plus and dark reader, and I see nothing.
I know what you’re saying, but the image of any browser window you open being totally blank cracked me up. I imagine, you close the window contentedly after a moment or two, day’s browsing done, and get on with your life.
Now that’s a blocker I might pay for. A reminder that there are better ways to spend my time when I’m not at work killing time between crises.
“Infomercial-Stupid”
Is this an redundant?