The cup holder story

The Cup Holder Story

I drive a Nissan Patrol (GU Y61). I love my Patrol, it’s the third one I have had. (One I sold and one I broke).

But man, Nissan did a crap job designing the OEM (original) cup holders! How the F*** am I supposed to get two large take away coffees sitting side by side into that thing! Seesh!

They put the bloody thing between two walls in the console, so your cups HAVE to fit between the walls! The arguments we would have when my Mrs and I would both want to put our coffees down for minute!

So back in 2020, I said stuff that and designed a cupholder upgrade solution that can be 3d printed. I am a product designer after all!
See the first published info here. 

The cupholder replacement design was rough, but effective enough and it solved my problem.

I thought to myself, why be selfish? There must be other Nissan Patrol owners out there that also suffer from this, I should share my new aftermarket cup holder joy with the community!

So I uploaded the 3d print files to the internet and shared on a popular forum under a Non-commercial Creative Commons licence. This means anyone can download and print it for themselves, but they can’t sell it.

The response was astounding! Thousands of downloads and hundreds of prints, despite it being a rather rough solution. But it wasn’t long before I started to find opportunist selling my cup holder design! I contacted each one and politely told them that it is an illegal practice as I own the intellectual property. Mostly people complied and stopped selling when asked.

But eventually that became too tedious, and I had to remove the files from the sharing site. But the Nissan Patrol aftermarket community still needed a solution, so I improved the design somewhat and started selling them myself on my personal website (https://www.makerdad.com.au).

It was when I met a decent sized auto accesories retailer in the Middle East that I decided its time to go commercial. So, we improved the design even more, designed it for injection moulding and tooled up for production.

Our first production run was a great success, and my Middle East partner reported that demand is 3 times more than he expected in just the first few months of being online.

As of early 2024, we became Boss Mods and we now produce more trim colours and made some minor improvements that aim to solve the latte cup holder problems for Patrol GU Y61 owners everywhere!