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drethelin comments on The cup-holder paradox - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think car purchasers are much more likely to be insane than car manufacturers. Cupholders seem like exactly the sort of thing that someone might forget to look into when purchasing a car, but it is one of the most common complaints due to constant daily interaction.
How many buyers do you think actually walk away from cars due to shoddy cupholders? I think the amount of complaining indicates that most people go on to buy cars and then complain.
I also think you're ignoring self-selection effects among complainers. A lot fewer people are qualified to complain about performance and gas mileage, but everyone gets annoyed by cupholders. This is probably related to why a sex scandal is much more devastating to a politician than decades of shitty policy choices.
I agree, and I think I found a Wikipedia article which supports your claim and references the effect you are referring to, so I'll link that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality
If people buy a car and then complain about it, that's bad press for the model, and hurts business.
Failing to model insane buyers is itself a failure of sanity in manufacturers.
This was my first reaction, too. I recall my car-buying experience consisting mostly of me trying to keep up with my impressions about seat-feel, head space, visibility, dash design, etc. and trying to somehow aggregate that information with numbers that I really didn't know how to process in the first place (e.g. safety ratings, scores from reviews, prices vs. upkeep costs). It wasn't until I'd pretty much picked out my car that I made an effort to mentally simulate a typical drive.
What this says to me is that the automakers have a cheap gimme to improve customer's reactions to their car, and they essentially leave money on the table when they don't take it. Cup holders are not ABS brakes or cruise control or a great sound system even, but neither are they nearly as expensive as any of these. Even the apple iPhone is (subjectively to a phone engineer) 90% the same as its predecessor, they just fixed the 10% that brought them from good to great.
Exactly what happened to me. Not with cupholders, but with "car shoddiness by a thousand cuts" that you don't realize until after you bought it, that isn't "bad" enough to justify returning but also is too bad to tolerate using the car. For example, a visor that can't fold out and to the side without significant collision with your head, and which also fails to protect most of the side window. Untraceable, hard-to-reproduce rattling sound. And a bunch of similar things I can't think of at the moment.
So the car had bad aesthetics/taste in the sense Paul Graham uses the term here.