Some of us smoke. Some of us don´t. Some want to smoke and can´t. All of us here drive and have ash or small coins to store somewhere.
This means we all have some interest in ashtrays in cars.
As regular members here know, I drive an elderly Citroen. Apart from a graunchy gearchange and dangerously pointy doors, it´s the ashtray that causes me the most dissatisfaction. The ashtray is well sized and illuminated by a nice green lamp that creates a ghostly wonderland of cigar ash as I travel about the land under the cover of darkness. I´d call this a selling point.
The tragedy is that the gear lever is so placed that one has to use ridiculously elaborate wrist acrobatics to direct the cigar tip to the ashtray. Another problem is that when the ashtray is open there is a gap between the lid and the fascia. That gap is so large I once lost a whole cigar to the car¨s inner workings. Luckily the Habana Feu was not lit at the time.
Twenty years on, have Citroen learned from the XM debacle? No. I was sitting in a C5 and the first thing I did was inspect the ashtray. If anything ,the position is slightly worse than in the 1989 car. And the ashtray is not so much a tray or receptacle as a very slightly inclined ledge, a sort of ash cranny. This is not good enough. During any long journey the accumulation of ash will result in a cascade of debris falling onto the fashionably soft plastic. This is a terrible problem. A box of Villiger Export, if smoked correctly, creates quite a lot of material, you know.
Ten minutes after visiting Citroen I was over at Ford´s dealer across town. I sat happily in the driver´s seat of the current Mondeo, an example in Ghia spec. To Ford´s credit, it´s a lovely interior. Lush, in fact. I don't have the cash but I really wanted to own this car. But. Butt. The ashtray lid was a cost-cutter's paragon. If you try to open the lid by pressing on the upper edge, the lid flexes markedly. It´s made of plastic that is too thin. If the plastic was 1.2 mm thick it ought to have been 2.4 mm thick. Better still, it ought to have been made of metal. And if you reached for the chromed lip on the lower edge of the panel, your fingers tended to slide off. Result: ashtray unopened. Frustration. Rage. Dropped ash.
Once you have finally prised the lid open the Mondeo you find that the "ashtray" is evidently the slightly inclined ledge that Citroen copied for their collage of ripped-off styling cues that is the current C5. "My name is Jacque Fresnois, and I benchmarked Ford´s ashtrays for my work on ze C5 interieur...."
Who among you has a car with a big, easy to use ashtray? Mr Kubrick...what are the Jaguars like?
Thoughts? Inferences?
Eventually I hope this thread can flower into a vibrant forum of ergonomic plaudits and brickbats.
B&N
