I'm shopping for a car, and I've spent many hours this past month reading user reviews of cars. There are seven things American car buyers have cared and complained about consistently for at least the past ten years. In roughly decreasing importance:
- Performance
- Gas mileage
- Frequency and expense of repairs
- Smoothness of ride
- Exterior and interior styling
- Cup-holders
- Cargo space
Six of these things are complicated design trade-offs. For a good design, increasing any one of them makes most of the other five take a hit.
Cup-holders are not a complicated design trade-off. This should be a solved problem: Put two large, sturdy cup-holders somewhere accessible from the driver's seat. There is nothing to be gained from saving a few centimeters on cup-holder space that could be worth the millions of buyers who will walk away from a $50,000 car because they don't like its cup-holders.
Seriously, build the cup-holders first and design the rest of the interior around them. They're that important.
In the 1970s, no one had cup-holders or knew that they needed them. Things began changing in the 1980s, perhaps due to the expansion of Starbucks, perhaps due to the sudden increase in commute lengths. Today I like to have at least two and preferably three drinks with me for my 1-hour morning commute: A hot coffee to wake up, cold water for when I burn myself with the coffee, and a soda or tea for variety.
But car manufacturers were glacially slow to respond. I've been looking at used Jaguar XJs. These cars originally cost about $100,000 in today's money. Their owners complained continually about the cheap tiny plastic folding cup-holders that couldn't hold cups. They posted do-it-yourself fixes in online forums. Jaguar didn't even begin to address this until 2004, at least fifteen years into the cup-holder crisis, when they made the cup-holders slightly (but not much) less-crappy, and large enough to hold a small coffee (but not a medium).
Most new cars today finally have two cup-holders up front, and the collapsible cup-holders that enraged drivers for years by (predictably) collapsing are finally gone, but many cup-holders still aren't large enough to hold a Starbucks venti.
What the cup-holder paradox implies is that there are many multi-billion dollar care companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on product development every year without ever assigning a single summer intern to take one day to read some of the many thousands of user reviews available for free on cars.com, autotrader.com, and other websites. If they had, they'd have realized the depth of America's anger at shoddy cup-holders.
Or perhaps they read the reviews and dismiss them, because their customers are obviously morons who don't appreciate good auto design. Even today, auto manufacturers post photos of the interiors of all their new cars on their websites, but never in a dozen photos give you a clear view of the cup-holders, which makes me lean toward this view.
Or perhaps the cup-holders aren't even considered during design, but are added on at the last minute, because cars didn't used to have cup-holders at all and so that's not part of the design process. Perhaps automakers have internalized their process of producing and selling cars, and they can't conceive of adding a new element to that process, at least not until all the old automakers die out.
My priors say that it's more likely that I'm imagining the whole thing, that I selectively remember reviews complaining about cup-holders because of my own preferences, than that there has been a massive, systematic cognitive failure on the part of all the world's auto-makers, spanning 20 years, during which many of them somehow failed to observe, comprehend, or address this trivially-simple complaint of their customers, despite the billions of dollars at stake.
Am I?
In high tech with novelty perhaps we think these things must always be focus-grouped.
But wouldn't fashion be an example of an industry where the novelty is tested by trying to sell it from the runway, and the successful designers, who presumably are greatly outnumbered by unsuccessful designers, have the success of their predicting what people will want labeled as "having taste?"
Jobs was said to have taste, and in a hauntingly beautiful interview you can hear him complaining about Gates/Microsoft that the real problem with them is that they don't have taste. It could be that some industries are much easier to succeed in by taste alone where others really do defy taste and need market testing.
Perhaps in some industries, succeeding by having taste is rarer than in others. But I would be interested in any particular innovations which really were game changers which were introduced through a more systematic process and were not the result of a small number of designers taking a shot in the dark.
Its hard to account it exactly, but if we estimate that the iPhone is worth 1/10 of Apple's value, then it is/was a $40 billion idea. And this jumping ahead of companies that had built model after model of cell phone to generally great reviews (Nokia and Motorola spring to mind).
So counting numerically, it might be rare to the vanishing point. But weighted by impact, I'd say genius levels of taste are the part of innovation that is most interesting.
Of course this doesn't mean that Jaguar should have put more cupholders in their cars sooner than they did, but it also doesn't prove they shouldn't have. Considering Jaguar used Lucas Electrics with a legendary failure rate from doing so for decades, it seems likely to me that Jaguar and other manufacturers have always had a lot to gain by being better at challenging their old mistakes.
By the way, I remember admiring all the clever and useful places that Honda had put cupholders and other useful pockets and surfaces in the Odyssey around the time my daughter thought I was an idiot for buying a Mercedes. There absolutely were car companies who paid attention to things in design that other companies didn't, and those companies have higher market shares now than they did decades ago.