This . . .
Seriously, I don’t think I’ve seen a ‘cigarette lighter’ in years.
These oversized, fragile, ineffective connectors drive me crazy!!
every car should just come with a crap load of USB ports instead of these crappy plugs. but on the other hand my little tire inflator has one of those cigarette plug connectors on it, and i use it at every track day and autocross.
I’m not sure how i feel about it, but i wouldn’t mind it if my daily only had USB ports…
Jalopnik has a nice article on this.
Interesting history.
Interesting future.
Hilarious comments…
Just to pluck one out, for the extra giggle: Doctors only endorsed Camel Cigarettes!
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Reminds me of an ad from that period (ahhh…the good ol’ days) for my favorite beer:
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I’d love to have a serious 12V jack inside for all sorts of things. I could install something but I’m not that motivated. Implements such as an air pump and such need plenty of power. Have to open the hood to clip to batteries. Need a high power 12V port but there is no standard adapter so there is no point to installing one unless I put its mate on the things I want to plug into it.
What also annoys me is to find a USB plug in a vehicle that puts out the minimum wattage. Wouldn’t you at least put a quality USB power driver hardwired into a vehicle? I have a Dodge vehicle that has one of these low end USB power ports. I can buy a piece of junk at the RaceTrac fuel stop for $3 if I want the worst charger ever made!
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Jast . . . my sentiments exactly
As a plug design, the standard car 12V plug (as first codified in the 1960 ANSI/SAE J563 standard) is kind of terrible. It’s a huge plug, the socket is a big, open hole, way too accepting of fingers or other appendages, and it’s generally clumsy and ungainly. But it’s also staggeringly beautiful and elegant when you think that it manages to recharge your iPhone from something that was designed to set a tube of weeds on fire near your face.
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USB power is one of those over-engineered standards that never seems to deliver what’s promised. High-resistance cables. Whatever magic resistor across the power leads isn’t the right value. Chips on both ends can’t agree whether the heavens are aligned so you get less than promised. On the third re-plug the chain of branded premium devices all finally decide to play along and deliver what’s expected. USB-PD was supposed to end these shenanigans and deliver up to 100W but it looks like the market’s playing the same dumb games and you’e pretty much limited to using OEM everything at a terrific price.
In cars, the USB plug wattage has become something to force an upgrade with higher-wattage being in higher trims and packages. Of course my solution to this problem was the same as yours - put a cheap dual-plug 3A charger in the far-more-convenient 12V outlet under the head unit and just use the USB outlet in the center console for a thumb drive with music on it.
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Interesting. I had a device recently that wouldn’t do high power charging with a good charger. Even though it was short, turned out to be the cable that, I guess, had too much resistance. Wow, how cheap do you have to be to put in wires that small. Must have been 30 ga or so not to tolerate two feet of cable resistance. But I did learn a lesson there.
My other frustration - USB cables without the data lines 
- I make sure I never buy those! Seems like I still have a few around and pick them up once in a while and they don’t work except for power!
I have been tempted to replace all the cig 12v outlets on my cars with those.
I had one where the light annoyed me. Masked off a very thin strip in middle of light and touched up with black nail polish. Made it much less annoying.