Suction cup bracket doesn't consistently suck

November 16, 2006

Welcome to my new and second blog. My intention is to identify consumer products that work well or badly, focusing on design and and quality. No I am not an engineer, but as I mention in my blog profile, I love mechanical and electronic things. My experience includes working in factories and machine shops and a very good lay understanding about how motors and things you'd find in those venues work. My first blog, by the way, was The Dodge Report at my former publication, Electronic Business.

My first victim is the suction cup bracket that came with my Garmin GPS nüvi 350. The nüvi is a great little GPS unit, but the suction cup that holds the unit to the windshield sucks. Or actually, it doesn't stay sucking like it should, constantly falling off the windshield even though it feels solidly built and looks smartly designed. Part of the problem might be that I keep removing it so as not to advertise the presence of this nifty little $600 unit (which tied for first place in Consumer Reports tests on portable GPS devices). Still, it should stay put every time I affix it to the windshield. Such irony: Garmin can get the sophisticated electronics right, but blows it with something as trivial as the bracket. When the whole thing collapses, it's very irritating and what will be even more of a travesty of a mockery of a sham is if the nüvi ends up breaking the next time it crashes against the console of my car.




The nüvi is a great little GPS unit, but the suction cup that holds the unit to the windshield sucks.



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Posted by John Dodge on November 16, 2006 | Comments (20)

Industries: Gadget Freak

November 6, 2009

In response to: Suction cup bracket doesn't consistently suck
AndrewJ commented:

While I know next to nothing about the GPS itself, (I stumbled here while searching for suction cup deisgn info but got curious for the reason of "non-stick") it seems intuitively logical to me that they *should have designed it with the idea of removal in mind from the start, simply by having a break-away shell, ie, a hard piece the connects to the suction cup and snaps into the actual GPS body, much like many other product breakaway designs. This resolves issues of repeatability by doing a ~one-time suction mount and repeated mechanical disconnects for portable storage. ~one-time because it still gives the user the capability to remove the entire product for mounting in a different vehicle should the need or desire arise.
Is it possible that you've overlooked such a feature? I know that I haave in the past, becuase the mating parts showed little evidence of the seam and I either failed to RTFM or it was written in 10 word gibberease and had little more than a "These is radio device have be the very best .... Puts the battery cell upwards here" sort of instructions.
If this is a duplicate of a previously reply, I apologize...I don't have time to read over previous comments right now (my bad) but have to move on to the task at hand.
best wishes

October 5, 2008

In response to: Suction cup bracket doesn't consistently suck
Eugene Barlow Jr. commented:

I have a Garmin Nuvi 350 unit. The suction cup doesn't work. Please let me know if there's a
better product to use. It does not stay on the
windshield. I like the GPS unit very much.
Any suggestions please, for the suction cup to
work better?

September 28, 2008

In response to: Suction cup bracket doesn't consistently suck
Ram Iyer commented:

I have the same problem with the Garmin GPS the suction cup is terrible keeps dropping off the dash the windshield!
Any solutions our there?

September 2, 2008