I turn heads when I stroll into a meeting with coffee cup in hand. I like coffee, and I drink a lot of the stuff, so my mug is an ample one. Park’s fuel tank, they call it. Stands about seven inches tall, about half that in width, with straight sides and a sturdy lid. It’s the perfect travel mug: well-balanced, excellent carrying capacity, and it keeps coffee drinkable for nearly two hours.

I’ve had this cup, or others like it, close at hand for years, but the trend toward more stylish vessels these days has my alarm bells ringing.

As the name suggests, travel mugs are for folks who like to drink coffee on the go. To me, travel means something more than a stroll down the office hall. I need a practical companion for my over-the-road journeys, and today’s spiffier mugs are anything but. Simply put, cups these days either fall over too easily or they’re entirely the wrong shape to fit any mug holder I’ve seen in a truck or car in the past five years.

I’ll ignore the howling from those who insist that I’m not capable of managing a steering wheel and a coffee cup, or a cell phone, at the same time. Such whining will never cease, nor will the desire to sip a little java while I motor.

We’ve come a long way in getting truck makers to recognize that truck drivers like to drink coffee from cups larger than your standard issue, coffee-machine-dispensed, four-ounce cardboard cup (which was probably where the truck designers started with their cup-holder designs).

But now that we have cup holders large enough to accommodate a mug of sufficient capacity, no one makes mugs that fit.

You don’t have to be a physicist to figure out that when you take a narrow-at-the-bottom, much-wider-at-the-top cup and fill it with coffee, and subject it to the G-forces achieved during even a mild brake application, it’s going to fall over. It’s top-heavy.

This is all about centre of gravity, you understand. Any self-respecting trucker understands centre of gravity, right?

But how about the people who design and manufacture the mugs? They’re obviously in league with the people who clean automotive upholstery.

Here’s the other side of the coin. I’m now seeing a boom in those bulbous softball-sized mugs that address the centre-of-gravity question, but you can’t put the wretched things anywhere except on the seat beside you or on the floor. They don’t fit into the cup holders.
And this creates another difficulty: that of having to fumble around in the dark on the passenger side of the vehicle for the mug. You need to take your eyes off the road to do so.

The dashboard might be an alternative, but Detroit (Japan, Korea, and Germany, too, for that matter) hasn’t designed a flat dashboard in at least a decade. Ditto for the truck makers. So what’s a coffee lover to do?

Functionality, dear reader, has succumbed to style. Like the toilet seat that complements the decor but won’t stay up.

We need to do a bit of reverse engineering here. We need to get back to basics.

I don’t need a coffee cup that looks good. I don’t need a coffee mug to enhance the interior appearance of my vehicle. I need one that will stand up on its own, hold a reasonable amount of coffee, and keep it warm for while. I had quite a collection of good mugs at one time, but judging by the rate at which mine disappear from our office kitchen, I’d say others have the same concerns I do.

You can’t buy mugs like that any more. With all the other challenges we face today, coffee mugs probably don’t rate much discussion (except that for truck drivers, the issue can have grave consequences). If you’ve got a “real” mug, hang on to it. Resist the urge to trade it for one of the fancier varieties. You’ll be disappointed in their performance, and you’ll soon tire of slopping up the mess on the floor when they spill.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had more near misses lunging for a toppling coffee mug than I’ve had while talking on a cell phone. Maybe the regulators are missing something here.

A former owner-operator,
Jim Park is editor of highwaySTAR magazine. He is a regular
contributor to Today’s Trucking.