10 Things I hate about you… Kia EV9 gripe #6
After 8 months and 10,000 miles, I am extremely happy with my 2024 Kia EV9 GT-Line. Nothing is perfect, though, so I’ll walk you through my top 10 gripes with the EV9:
#6 Front cupholders
Oh yeah… these cupholders are AWFUL
It’s worth noting that these complaints are not in any particular order, but I think that’s self-evident from the relative impact of some of the items.
It’s really only been a few decades that you have gotten cupholders in cars at all. Early on, they were terrible - poorly conceived and executed. As with any other innovation, they’ve improved massively in the time since their introduction.
The Kia EV9, like most modern vehicles, is equipped with many cupholders. Every passenger in the vehicle has at least one cupholder within arm’s reach. There are even supplementary bottle holders in the door cards. All of this is very thoughtful, except the cupholders in the front center console are not awesome.
The interior designers looked at the premium space in the console and decided that it made sense to make the area multifunctional. I understand the reasoning. They then created an odd Transformer-like deploying cupholder assembly. The two cupholders are of different diameters. Assuming the front two occupants each have a similar size can/bottle/cup, one of the two won’t fit well. For all of the unnecessary mechanical complexity of the cupholders, they can’t securely hold smaller diameter vessels than the holder’s inner diameter.
Sweet lord.
It’s an engineering problem, for sure, but it’s one that’s been tackled with various levels of success for decades. Multiple inner diameter rings, at different depths. Rubber flaps. Spring-loaded “fingers”. Spring-loaded support rings. All I know is that any solution is probably better than no solution.
In an effort to try to earn extra credit, Kia also put buttons (360 camera, parking sensor toggle, etc.) right behind the cupholder most likely to spill a drink (IMO). Those buttons are way less useful when gummed up with Starbuck’s Strawberry Acai Lemonade Refresher. That’s what my friend told me, anyway.
Lest you think this is just a “me” problem, I direct you to Printables, where some legend has designed a fix. Janky, but effective. Hopefully Kia will fix this in the mid-cycle refresh.
This is a good workaround, but it’s still a shocking miss from Kia
