The Car Cup Holder Sponge Coaster

One thing that drives me nuts in my car are drinks that spill in the cup holder. It's not a big mess, just drips down the side and make your cup holder sticky enough that when you throw change in it later the coins are all yucky.

One day as I was cleaning out the car, I kept thinking that I needed to figure out a way to stop the sticky mess from happening or at least cut down on the mess. I thought about those padded shelf liners you can pick up pretty cheap, but I thought it might be difficult to peel up to clean and not really cut down on the stickiness factor.

At the store I saw a stone car coaster, even though it says it fits most vehicles I didn’t want to buy it for the $3.00 that it cost, besides my cup holders are a D shape and not round like the coaster, so it would not be a good fit.

The answer: A sponge. I had a pack of sponges I had bought at a dollar store that came in varying thicknesses (unfortunately, all pink). I don’t have a deep cup holder, so a thick one was out of the question. Since I'm not very good at cutting down the side of a sponge to make it thinner, I found the thinnest sponge I could and it was about the same thickness as the car coaster.

I traced the cup holder on a piece of paper and cut out the paper to get the best estimate for size. I decided to go a little smaller than the cup holder as I found that getting the sponge out took some doing since I don’t have fingernails. I set a cup in to check stability and viola; I have a chance at a less messy cup holder. Plus I can just snatch the sponge out and rinse with water/soap to clean and put it back in.


One thing I have to note that the sponges do get hard after enough rinsing, either I will just cut a new one or wet the sponge while my drink is in the holder. I guess I’ll see how this test goes, if it doesn’t work, I’ll pay out the money for the car coaster and have only lost a couple of sponges in the process.

Update: It has been almost two years and I still have the same sponges in my cup holders, none the worse for the wear.