Spare Change?

I find myself drawn to innovative products. They don’t have to be life altering to interest me. A few great examples in the last several years: the lever-pull wine-opener; the heating/cooling automobile cup-holder; and the impending elimination of the automobile gas cap.

Notice that there was no mention of any Ronco product, even if Mr. Popeil’s rotisserie oven does allow you to “set it, and forget it.” Also intentionally absent from my brief list are all of those Coinstar machines. (Don’t most banks still do that for free?!?)

I guess I could have mentioned lotion-filled toilet paper, but I touched on that in an earlier post, and still haven’t actually tested it for myself.

Did you notice that two of the three things I listed at the beginning had to do with innovations in cars? Some who know me may think it was no accident, and they would be correct. It is not, however, because I work in the automotive industry, but, rather, because I wanted to make a smooth segway into my proposal for a long-overdue innovation in automobiles. (The Segway certainly could have been listed as a cool innovation, though!)

Here is my (perhaps less than brilliant) suggestion for the next automobile innovation: A chute, leading from the side of the driver’s seat, down to a compartment in the center console. Before you judge the idea, let me explain…

I was driving down the highway recently, when I heard the clinking of coins falling from my pocket. I muttered to myself, while reaching down quickly beside me, in a futile attempt to snatch the coins. I don’t know if your car is anything like mine, but when coins fall out of my pocket, they don’t just slide to the back of the seat cushion, to be retrieved once I get up from the seat. In my car, there is a hole in the seat, through which the seat belt extends. When coins fall from my pocket, they are very carefully funneled through that hole, disappearing beneath the seat. It would be bad enough if the coins stopped there. At least then I’d have the opportunity, every few years when I actually clean the interior of my car, to retrieve the coins from under the seat. Unfortunately, the sadistic designers of my car were more creative than just that… After falling through the crack in the seat, coins are then funneled into a channel of the bracket supporting the seat. The bracket passes through the carpet and is fastened to the floorboard of the car. By entering the channel of the bracket, the coins manage to pass through that small opening in the carpet, never to be seen again. After muttering to myself, knowing that more coins had disappeared forever, it occurred to me that if designers can so effectively design a chute to direct my change to some unreachable nether-regions of my car, they should be able to funnel the loose change to somewhere useful, to be removed when I need an extra nickel for a slushee at the gas station.

Remember a couple of decades ago when we needed drink carriers from fast-food restaurants, because cars didn’t have cup-holders? These days, most people wouldn’t dream of buying a car without at least a few cup-holders – and more is better! The other innovations listed above certainly haven’t transformed the market the way the automobile cup-holder has. (Surprisingly, the cup-holder is still noticeably absent from many European cars, and Ferrari does not make a single car with built-in cup-holders.) Give the others time, though. They may yet see their day. And remember, twenty years from now, when you’re driving through a tollbooth, and you reach into the compartment beside your seat for loose change that had fallen from your pocket, you read about it here first.