To me, drinking in a car is a very American thing and I don't think this would be a problem here. If this product works in most of the world but not the US, it would still be better than using plastic cups everywhere.

Although paper cups are already common anyway.

People drink in their car all over the world, what makes it "very American"?

> A drive-through or drive-thru (a sensational spelling of the word through), is a type of take-out service provided by a business that allows customers to purchase products without leaving their cars. The format was pioneered in the United States in the 1930s by Jordan Martin,but has since spread to other countries.

> In 1981, Max Hamburgers opened Northern Europe's first drive-in in Piteå.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-through

American infrastructure is built around cars, more so than many (/most?) other countries. Towns/cities in Europe are generally built to be walkable.

At least here in Norway it would be very unusual for a coffee cup to be left in the car and anyway many of those who do drink a lot of coffee on the go use a reusable cup bought from a petrol station that gives you a year of 'free' coffee. See https://www.circlek.no/koppen for instance.

That's pretty cool. How much is that? "Costa Coffee" (a UK chain) machines are in lots of petrol stations nowadays, but I'm not aware of any kind of subscription.

For the standard 240 ml cup it costs 349 kr a year including the cup, if you reuse last year's cup it's 299 kr and they apply a sticker to the cup to say which year it applies to. Or you can buy a fancy vacuum cup at 499 kr a year. If you register for Circle K Extra and use more than a 1000 litre of fuel a year (800 litre if you pay with a Circle K Mastercard) then you get the standard cup deal free. 1 GBP = 12 kr at the moment. So the standard cup is a bit under 30 quid, 25 to renew. So if you use it even only once a week it pays.

Pret a Manger has a coffee subscription program in the UK, at £20/month. Not quite the same model as petrol stations, but close.

Here in the UK it's quite unusual for a coffee shop to have parking facilities. Drinking takeaway coffee is practically always done by people who are walking somewhere.

It might be unusal for them to have dedicated parking facilities (though there are a good number of Starbucks and Costa drive thrus now) but outside of London and city centres there is almost always shared parking close by.

I'm in the UK too, and I've found there are separate coffee shops that are focused on pedestrians vs car users. The first are your typical shops on the high street (which yes you could park near to but that's not really the focus) while the second are in motorway services or in a retail park built around a car park (what Americans would call a "strip mall"). If you're a regular user of either one then it's quite easy to imagine the other doesn't exist but actually they're both very common.

It probably happens more in America than elsewhere in the world. Simply because Americans probably spend more of their lives inside a car than people from other countries.

I*m not convinced. Pretty much every gas station here in Norway has a convenience store that sells coffee - not really much different in that regard from the US (I'm from the US). Not as many fast food restaurants, though the gas station fare is better here than the US.

In France as well coffee is available in gas stations, highway rest areas, etc. But people usually drink their coffee before going back to their car, not while driving.

I'm in the UK, but was going to say the same thing. I agree with the GP - drinking while driving, or even just the idea of drive-through coffee, are very American things.

I don’t have stats to back me up but are they cup holders or drink holders? Because I think in many parts of the world people mainly put cans and bottles there, than paper cups.

No, they don't. Non-american cars don't even have the hole for the cup (that Ford ones for example have). So, not remotely common, at all.

We need more environmental tech, but we also have to adapt our behaviour a little bit.

How can you make something that is degradable in an environmental friendly way, but also last forever? Something has to give.

> but we also have to adapt our behaviour a little bit

And this is what is largely holding us back. "Fear of loss" is a very big deal whenever you talk about large-scale modifications to a system with which people have grown very familiar.

People can always find a reason why a particular change "simply cannot work" or "is more trouble than it is worth" or "the benefits are not outweighed by the downsides" or "my use does is not compatible" and so on and so forth.

The spectrum is massive. From paper straws to "if you are able and if you live in a place where it is possible, look for ways to not drive so often," lots of people will be in a big hurry to tell you why that flatly cannot be done.

As someone who does transit advocacy in a dense city with good transit, it is very frustrating.

> As someone who does transit advocacy in a dense city with good transit, it is very frustrating.

While going a bit off topic, the issue I have seen with advocacy groups is that they focus on solving for the median case (eg. 80% of trips are less than 5km) whereas people usually take decisions that work for them in the edge cases (what if i need to take my ageing dad to the hospital on a rainy night, what if i have to take my kid to a far away school for a competition).

To drive real habit change, you have to have good solutions for the edge case - otherwise people will just default to re-using their edge case solution for their median use cases (sunk cost).

In the city I live in for example, even 6-7 years ago, it was essentially impossible to find a cab in the rain. I've personally missed a flight due to a sudden downpour.

With reliable and massive inventory of ride sharing NOW available where i live, I am comfortable living without a car. In my hometown where my parents live (a smaller city which also has a transit system but poor cab service), I still would not do that.

I wonder if a hybrid approach between disposable and "keep cup" could work.

The "default" takeaway option could be the short-lasting paper cup.

For car, office or just comfort, you could have a squashy, silicone (stands high temp) outer that would usually only need to be cleaned if the inner cup fails.

A silicone shell with disposable inner would work well for me, at least. The shell would rarely need to be cleaned and can be easily pocketed.

This is why I try to carry my travel mug as much as I can, and most place I buy coffee from gives you a small price reduction (like ¢10) when you bring one.

I guarantee you that most people won't care about the environment after the first time they have to partially disassemble their car to get all the dried coffee out.

Should cars have a coffee tank? Imagine pouring coffee at a stop just like petrol and have dispenser somewhere near driving seat with a mouthpiece.

It could even come with an IV drip. Then you could eat and get caffeinated at the same time.

I think a reusable coffee cup would be a much simpler solution.

A Mercedes-Benz Keurig partnership perhaps.

Then they'll stall the car with their DRM because you bought generic coffee.

That's a good point, but the world goes through something like half a trillion disposable cups per year. Even if 99% of them are used exclusively to store hot liquids in cars for over two hours, that still leaves 5 billion cups per year that we could usefully replace with these.

Just a little overhead of deciding which type of cup you want and to not forget to keep the melting one out of your car.

Someone mentioned a silicone sleeve in the cup holder would be a fine solution to this.

I don’t think it would be the end of luxury if we had to finish our drinks within 2hs. If it had always been that cups leak after 2hs, this wouldn’t be a problem or cars would be designed to make the cup holders easy to wash.

Sounds like these new cups would be perfectly useful in cafes in non-car-centric communities.

Of course a drive-through would not be selling them.

But a cup of water heated to the boiling point would long have cooled off by the 2 hours, so would this still count then?

The article said nothing about maintaining a boil in the test cups - presumably the water in the cups under test cooled as well, no?

Well that's exactly what I'm asking.

PLA is known to get soft at near-boiling temps. Cups do start leaking and generally slump into a puddle. But this is purely an effect of the heat, it can handle the water just fine if it's cold.

This is unmodified PLA so I wonder if this isn't the same with the 'modified' stuff, or if the added fibres get soft when they get wet like paper.

I'm not sure existing paper cups would fair much better, would they?

The millions of drivers with disposable coffee cups in their cars would disagree.

Most disposable coffee cups (the kind you'd find in the Starbucks of the world) have a plastic lining (polyethylene) that's responsible for the cup not devolving into a soggy mess with hot liquids.

Although it appears that replacing the plastic with wax might make it more recyclable/compostable.