Poor coffee holders in 99 saab 9-3

I like my car. I bought it over a year ago on ebay. It’s nice and comfortable, maybe not quite to the level of some other european cars I’ve driven, yet something about the hatchback and the brand makes it okay to throw a dozen forty pound bags of manure in the back, something that I don’t feel right about doing with a BMW, for example.

There is one feature that is particularly lacking in this car, and that is a functional cup holder. There is a flimsy device that pops out of the dash board that goes by that name, but it is good for holding nothing larger than a 12 ounce can of soda. I certainly wouldn’t trust it with a travel mug full of coffee! I’ve seen CD-ROM drives whose trays would be better-suited to the task. If they can’t put in a REAL cup holder, they shouldn’t have bothered with one at all. It’s the promise of a cup holder, but it’s so weak that you quickly give up on using it for anything. I don’t even feel good about leaving a nearly-empty travel mug in there in a parked car! I have to get out of the car, dump the contents of the mug by the curb, and place the empty mug safely on my indestructible rubber floor mats, but cloth floor mats are a topic for another rant.

See the pathetic cupholder loaded to maximum capacity. Please note how only one support is used to hold the bottom of the beverage container, leading to instability in taller containers such as coffee travel mugs.

Moving on to the back seat passenger accomodations, the cupholder situation back there is even worse. The center console opens with a hinge at the back, and in the underside of its surface when it’s open is a 3/4″ deep indentation that I think is supposed to suggest another cup holder. I would trust this one even less than the one in front.