1999 VW Passat Beverage Holders

Passat Beverage Holders are a triple-threat of poor design!

Passat Beverage Holders are a triple-threat of poor design!

1999 VW Passat Beverage Holders
The beverage holders in my 1999 VW Passat are a very poor design, in both front and rear passenger compartments. Technically, they are very nice. They collapse neatly – nearly invisibly – into a thin recess in the center console. The one in the rear compartment failed almost immediately after I bought the car new. Something broke on it and it would no longer stay retracted. No matter; I never sit back there anyway; Nor do I often carry passengers, so I just pulled it out and threw it in the glove box, where it resides to this day. But the one in front is much worse. It presents a unique triple-whammy of failures, suffering not only from poor design, per se, but also from the poor implementation of a poor design.

The design is poor because it fails to take into account the very purpose for which it is intended: To hold beverages. Because it is designed to retract into a very thin space, its design employs various thin, hinged and telescopic moving parts that ride tongue-in-groove fashion upon one another. And herein lies the problem. It is inevitable, especially in a moving car, that the beverage being held will slosh about and some will spill. Indeed, the thin design behaves much like a diving board, amplifying the resonant frequencies of the vehicle’s suspension system at every bump, inducing spillage. It’s almost as if the thing was designed to spill! And If that beverage happens to be a sweetened coffee, soda or juice, it will invariably evaporate, leaving behind a concentrate of extremely sticky residue (sugar). As a result, these tightly-fitting, telescoping parts easily become glued together by the sticky resin. This even affects the push-to-release mechanism, making it impossible to coax the holder from its retracted position without prying it open with a screwdriver. But there is yet another problem: The location of the beverage holder in relation to the car’s radio. Once deployed, the holder places the rim of a soda can or coffee mug in extremely close proximity to the radio control buttons. Again, the inevitable sloshing of a drink in a moving car causes the drink to spill onto the radio buttons. And again, when it evaporates, it becomes a sticky, concentrated adhesive inside the buttons, making them “stick” when depressed. Another horrible and unintended consequence.

Lessons Learned/Solution:
A recurring theme here at PoorDesign is this: Keep your eyes on the prize. Don’t forget to consider the use environment and conditions under which your design will be utilized. The engineers at VW designed a very clever mechanism. It works wonderfully under ideal conditions, and retracts beautifully flush with the console. But once a mere drop of soda or coffee makes its way onto any of the sliding surfaces, it quickly becomes glued shut. And these tight spaces cannot even be accessed to clean them. It is a one-way trip to dysfunction junction. The moving parts should have been designed to be immune to the affects of inevitable spillage. It would certainly have helped if the engineers had at least provided some form of vibration damping to isolate the holder from the natural jostling that occurs while driving on anything other than a glass-smooth road.

Workaround: Don’t drink anything other than pure water when driving your VW Passat!

Screen Door Handle Razor Sharp!

Razor sharp burrs on this extruded plastic screen-door handle invite injury like a malevolent chameleon!

Razor sharp burrs on this extruded plastic screen-door handle invite injury like a malevolent chameleon!

Screen Door Handle Razor Sharp!
As promised a few weeks back, here is the first in a series of posts regarding things with dangerous handles recklessly designed to inflict injury.
The screen door that leads to my patio is a prime example. Take a look at the photos above. This handle is made from a plastic extrusion. The extruded profile is then punched to the tapered shape you see. The punching process is the problem here. Punching is actually a shearing process, and as such always produces tell-tale burrs and sharp edges. These are usually much more evident, and dangerous, on metal than on plastic. But the manufacturers of my patio door somehow managed to produce some seriously sharp burrs and sharp edges for this plastic handle. Irresponsible? You bet! I haven’t found a manufacturer’s name on this screen door yet, but if I do, you can be sure I will add it to this post.

Lessons Learned/Solution:
As is the case so many times here at PoorDesign, do I really have to spell it out? It would seem so obvious, yet time and again I see handles and knobs which invite our hands to use a product while, like some kind of malevolent chameleon, they contain dangerously sharp edges and burrs that lie in wait for the hapless user who has the audacity to simply attempt to use them as intended. Sharp edges and burrs are bad enough when left exposed anywhere on a product, but when they are present on a handle, the very thing which requires us to grab it in order to use the product, they are beyond inconvenient; They represent reckless and willful intent to maim the customer. I would ask “what were they thinking?!?!?” but that would give the designers credit for actually thinking at all. The answer, then, as is so often the case: Deburr, deburr, deburr! I know it adds labor, and therefore cost. I suppose some clever accountant somewhere has performed a careful analysis of the “tipping point” between the costs of deburring and the lost profits from alienating repeat customers. The presence of sharp edges on a handle tells us where we, the customers, come out in that calculation. There is another alternative to deburring, though: Use a different cutting technology to shape the handle. Laser and abrasive-jet cutters produce little to no burrs. Or, as another alternative, an inexpensive tumbling process can be employed to remove, or at least soften, such dangerously sharp edges left behind by the fabrication process.