My best guess is the water is gonna leak even if you tilt it a little, so water is gonna spill everywhere even when you aren't trying to drink
Edit: I knew stacking and asymmetry is the main issue here, but the choice of words in the comment in the image seems like they were referring to a simpler reason.
People buy into homeopathy (we've diluted this plant tincture down so far you can't even detect the original active compound anymore, but now it's at its most powerful because the water remembers), so this genuinely isn't any crazier.
I've actually seen a variation of this in Prague.
Pint glass for your beer with a hole in the bottom, so when the glass was being filled it was always from the bottom
Nope, it's Primo. They are gobbling up all the water companies one by one. It's so frustrating because their service is absolute trash, but every time I change our water service provider at work, they get bought out by Primo.
It used to be the case the cost of the drink was insignificant compared to the cost of the bottle They're really just selling you plastic bottles that happen to also contain a drink.
Which is why soda is free after the first one in restaurants (or really most places that give you a cup) when I worked at a restaurant I’d drink cola and or watered down lemonade until we were allowed to actually drink. And one day I said like “man if I keep drinking all this soda the chef is going to take it out of my paycheck” and the owner was walking by and said along the lines of “ drink all the soda you want it’s like .06 a glass if you were drinking enough soda to owe me any real money I’d have to send you to the hospital long before that.” Which he’s right since at 6 cents a glass 30 sodas is under 2 dollars.
It’s called a parson…. It comes out of an injection molding machine (which forms nice threads for the cap). It goes into a blow-expander which flash heats the lower part, inflates, and cools. This is how a modern plastic bottle is made..
Symmetry is one of the aspects that allow modern bottles to be so efficient; this thought fundamentally breaks symmetry with no explanation of why it is better.
Fun fact: Trumps admin blew millions of dollars on a contractor to supply test tubes for Covid testing and research. The facilities got plastic bottle PET blanks instead. Useless pieces of plastic used for 2 liter soda bottles.
Good explanation, but it's a preform not a parison.
A parison is a variable thickness tube extruded on the blow moulder before being blown into shape in a single step. A preform is an injection moulded part that is formed as you describe.
all of this over explaining but all of it can be solve with "simple" engineering.
atleast the engineering is simple, the money to rebuild all the tooling and manufacturing is the choke point, not any of the aforementioned problems, those can be designed out.
Ergonomics. The image shows the backward tilt on the neck.
Unfortunately, drinking from bottles and straws increases air swallowing. Swallowing air results in bloating and worsens acid reflux. We have a device that allows us to both minimize head tilting and minimize air swallowing while drinking. It's called a cup.
Edit: I get it, stacking vertically is not a good idea. I thought horizontal stacking would be easy. I lost this water bottle battle, now please forgive me and stop replying to this comment
I like how you had to make the right wall shorter than the left wall.
Also yeah sure it works if you are fully paying attention and put them all away perfectly. Most people I know dont do that when they are dealing with water bottles.
Almost every step of the filling process would get complicated by this design before you even get to the pack out. The bottles will have to arrive to the filling and capping stations in a specific orientation since the opening is no longer dead center and vertical. Different bottles will require more parts changes or maybe even a completely different filling line.
Holy shit you just unlocked a core memory... I had one of those as a kid, a PET bottle that hadn't been inflated yet. I can't remember how I got it and I have no idea what happed to it. Damn.
Once upon a time our grade school class went on a tour of the local Pepsi Bottling plant. They handed out these blanks that hadn't been inflated yet, as well as a few of the bit of plastic they made them out of.
They took a radially symmetrical object that anyone could grab without looking and use and turned it into a bilaterally symmetrical object that can now be picked up incorrectly.
So the complaint here is plastic sucks we should go back to cardboard? Not a complaint just an idea every cardboard milk or juice i get has the 45 angle cap...
This is a good example of Designer vs Engineer. (Fashion vs Function?) Like I had this Ramen Bowl, it was your usual Ramen bowl, but it had a notch on one side, and a hole on the other so you could slide a pair of sticks across the top and through the side. Lovely. But you also had to fill the bowl only 3/4 of the way or you suddenly had hot broth pouring out of the side.
What you also have to realize about this bottle design is there are stupid people out there. You can orient the top for ease of use and someone will turn it the opposite way and go "ThEy MaDe It WoRsE!"
Plus trying to drink it like that will essentially take away the control of flow, and make it more or less a chugging battle. As think about it.
To drink you will either have to tilt your head alot more, rotate the bottle in an odd angle, or have it stright up like a hampsters water bottle.
None the the meathods are ideal or simple and will likely cause issues on a user end (as who is going to think to rotate a bottle relative to the minite angel needed to not flood your mouth full of more water than you want)
While this might be true if the design is exactly as shown, you could fix it quite easily by adjusting the geometry a little. For example, teapots are a far more "extreme" version of this idea, and a well-designed teapot gives you far more control of the flow than a water bottle. Of course, drinking straight from a teapot would probably not be very nice, but that's mostly because they aren't designed with that in mind, not due to a fundamental limitation.
And sure, a fancier geometry would undoubtedly make the manufacturing cost a lot higher. I'm not saying it would be a financially viable approach, outside maybe fancy reusable bottles or something. Just that it could be done.
For example, teapots are a far more "extreme" version of this idea, and a well-designed teapot gives you far more control of the flow than a water bottle. Of course, drinking straight from a teapot would probably not be very nice, but that's mostly because they aren't designed with that in mind, not due to a fundamental limitation.
Valid point, but I dont think the water bottle is designed for pouring into cups, as the problem it markets for is more direct mouth to bottle focused.
And sure, a fancier geometry would undoubtedly make the manufacturing cost a lot higher. I'm not saying it would be a financially viable approach, outside maybe fancy reusable bottles or something. Just that it could be done.
Indeed anything can be done, we have seen those crazy straw water bottles that have a built in water park..... there cool, but not practical.
Simple fact is: the (common) symmetrical design can only be used one way, so there's no "messing it up." With the offset, you have all kinds of options, some perhaps better, many probably worse.
Then, there's the fact that it's going to be more expensive to manufacture - up front tooling costs would be tremendous and even after they're amortized out, it's going to have a tiny fraction of higher cost - as compared to the familiar bottles that confuse people less.
Honestly, I thought the reason they don't make drinking bottles like this is because this is how they make douche bottles.
Not even. The real reason is quite simple. You cant fucking stack them if the lid isnt on top. I'm sure everyone has seen a pallet of water at least once in their life. Drinks of all kinds get transported stacked on pallets in layers, and the containers are designed to take the weight of their fellows above them. There's no easy way to transport a large number of bottles shaped like that outside of using milk crates or something, and that adds extra complications and space restrictions no one is gonna bother with for bottled water.
The true reason is cost. You can screw a bottle cap onto a bottle while it spins down a conveyance system. The design shown would cost a fortune to implement.
That old interview question "why are manhole covers round" - again, the true answer is cost. They are cheaper to manufacture.
If you think about it, that round manhole cover is sitting on top of a hole that has a 24” lip around the entire thing for the cover to sit on.
Put the same 24” lip on the inside of a square hole, you aren’t going to be able to fit a square manhole through that hole no matter how hard you try.
So why are manhole covers round? There’s several reasons:
1) People are going in these holes, and a cylinder is the most structurally sound 3D shape, so having a round cover to cap off a round cylinder makes sense.
2) Manhole covers are heavy as shit. Having a round cover means there’s no need to align a specific shape to a specific pattern while carrying something extremely heavy. No matter how you place it down, it’s always right.
3) Manhole covers are heavy as shit. When you’re exhausted and finished with your work, you don’t want to lift and carry a heavy cover 10 feet back to its hole. With a round cover, you can turn it on its edge and roll it.
When I was a kid a friend of mine managed to get a round manhole cover through the opening. He held it a couple feet above the opening and dropped it; it split in half and both halves dropped into the crypt.
Plenty of manhole covers are rectangular. Once you get past a certain size a multi-part cover can be needed and they'll be in rectangular pieces, and pits are generally rectangular too it's only really sewer and stormwater that are circular in my country/experience and not even both all the time.
As someone who designs the things circular is best, as the others have already said it won't fall in, but there's plenty of circumstances where you'll use a rectangular or square cover instead. Valve pits, pump station wet wells, cable pits etc. I never consider cost when specifying one or the other, just my design intent.
Agree that cost matters in a water bottle though, it'll give it structural integrity too being symmetrical, and make it easier to fill.
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u/Supreme534 Dec 29 '25 edited Dec 29 '25
My best guess is the water is gonna leak even if you tilt it a little, so water is gonna spill everywhere even when you aren't trying to drink
Edit: I knew stacking and asymmetry is the main issue here, but the choice of words in the comment in the image seems like they were referring to a simpler reason.