I am not a smoker. I have never smoked in my life.
But I miss the ashtrays that we used to have in cars.
I always used the ashtrays to keep coins for parking meters and for the occasional pan handler by the side of the road.
Now I have no place to store my coins.
Not being a smoker, I never had any use for the cigarette lighters, either. I routinely removed those from my cars and literally threw them in the garbage. I never needed them. I used the lighter sockets for my device chargers, of course, and I still do.
But the lack of the ashtrays brings up a larger point, particularly now that we have so many wildfires in California. Even though smoking rates are way down from what they used to be, there are still smokers in the world and they drive.
Where do they put their cigarette butts with no ashtrays in cars? They have to throw them out the window. While that may not be a big deal in Ohio, it can quickly be catastrophic in California. Not to mention all the littering. Just look out your car doors at busy intersections. Cigarette butts abound. And I even understand that. Where is a smoker going to put the butts?
What were car manufacturers thinking when they started removing ashtrays from cars?
What a great idea for an after-market device!
What a great idea for an after-market device!
That started me thinking — turns out there are already lots of choices out there. Even a “Hello Kitty” version.
Thinking they could save a dollar without bothering you. But they were wrong.
I am not sure it’s saving a dollar. There are easier ways to do that. Somebody must have made a decisions, actually, many somebodies. It seems ashtrays are missing from pretty much all cars now. I rent at least 20 – 30 cars a year, so I get through many. Just two this week. And neither had an ashtray. One was a Jeep, the other a Chevy Malibu.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” I read somewhere. And, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism,” said by the Australian man who collected 3 large jars of his own belly lint, over many years, and was on Jay Leno or as it David Letterman… (See The Pocket Lint Chronicles). HA!
But this action (above) just proves that the unintended consequences of doing anything — for good or evil — will never be known. “Good” and “Evil” can eventually be complete misnomers.
BTW, when we bought our Toyota, a smallish, heavy-plastic black jar with a sturdy screw-top was provided in the glove compartment for just such a dead-ciggie need. Smart company. Their designers actually sat in and drove the car they designed.
Is it possible that the absence of ashtrays was supposed to discourage people from smoking? If so, they know nothing about addiction. A smoker is going to smoke. Period. I quit 26 years ago, and while I’ve done a lot of hard things in my life, that was definitely the hardest.
I am not sure how 20 different car companies all over the world would suddenly have decided that they could actually make this happen. That seems like an impossible conspiracy. And why car companies?