I’m not sure if you’re like me and gauge the overall progress of a society based on the variety and number of places one can comfortably take a long, comfortable dump, but if so, then I suspect you’ve seen the news about how Chinese carmaker Seres has patented a fairly revolutionary new in-car toilet system. As a dedicated and lifelong defecator ever since that first production of the meconium, I laud this innovation while simultaneously realizing that it’s a wake-up call for an increasingly vast Car Pooping Gap with China.
Seres Auto was founded in 2016 and was allied with Huawei for a time, but that partnership ended. The company currently builds two EVs, the Seres 5 and Seres 7, either of which can currently be shat in, but just in the same way one can shit in any car, and contain no specialized systems for human waste management or removal.
This patent suggests a very different future for car-shitters, and the system appears quite well-considered and reflects some clever new thinking in the field. The current state of the art for in-vehicle urine and fecal management systems is primarily focused on the RV market, where those vehicles have far greater resources for usable toilet areas and storage tanks for the waste. In a conventional passenger car, those sorts of luxuries cannot be counted upon.
An in-car toilet needs to take up as little space as possible, both for the active toilet hardware and the waste storage. Seres’ patent, number B60R15/04, addresses these issues with some bold ideas from inventors that include Wang Pengcheng, Zheng Yaokai, Ye Xiaojun, Lin Zhenting, and Feng Tao; some of you may be familiar with their previous work in car-pooping.
The Seres patent describes a system where the toilet assembly is mounted to a sliding track system, allowing it to be pulled out from under the seat when needed, and pushed back when one’s foul business is done.
I would think, based on the pictures that include a drain pipe-looking assembly, that it is in fact the seat that pushes back and away, exposing the toilet for use.
The tracks for the seat seem to be concealed under the toilet seat itself; I expect the seat itself would intrude into the rear seat area, so I suppose whoever may be seated behind you would have to move should you decide to relieve yourself. Could this setup work for a second-row seat? I suppose as long as there is room behind the seat, as in a van, minivan, or perhaps an SUV or wagon?
The patent also notes that a ventilation system will attempt to move odors and miasmas outside of the car, and a heating element system will evaporate urine and dry out potentially moist poops. This is similar to RV-based waste-cooking systems like we’ve written about before that used the exhaust heat of the RV’s engine to incinerate waste.
The difference here is that Seres vehicles are electric, so any waste-heating would have to be handled via electric heating systems, similar to the process you may have used yourself when boiling away urine on an electric stove.
One aspect of Seres’ in-car toilet system that I don’t think makes much sense is that there is a “voice activation” component. I’m not entirely clear how it works, but if you have to verbally give commands like “ACTIVATE TOILET” or “FLUSH TOILET,” then it’s going to completely destroy any chance of being able to use such a system clandestinely in a bathroom emergency situation while others are in the car.
If they would just have some discreet buttons for the toilet, you could play it off like you were just adjusting your seat and making yourself a bit more comfortable by lowering your pants as you then sweatily and determinedly void the contents of your colon into the in-car toilet, hiding your grunts and plopping sounds by just cranking up the music to near-deafening levels.
Your white-knuckled hands on the steering wheel and grimaces of pain from the presumably harrowing emergency pooping process could just be explained away by the fact that you’re trying to really focus on driving.
But no, that’s all ruined if you have to verbally announce OPEN TOILET or whatever, because then everyone in the car will probably demand that you pull over and at least let them get the hell out of the car before you do that, dear lord, what are you thinking and all that. Candy-asses.
Also, I don’t have any evidence that this would fit the driver’s seat.
Interestingly, I’ve written about a passenger car with an in-seat toilet system before, for The Old Site. That car was a customized 1954 Rolls-Royce that had a toilet set into the rear seat, under the rear cushion:
This was a comparatively simple system, as the flush mechanism was just a means to dump the wastes under the bottom of the car onto the road or parking lot.
We’ve come a long way since then, clearly, though mass acceptance of in-car pooping and peeing systems still remains elusive. But maybe now this announcement of Chinese advances in in-car crapping will finally kick-start a real In-Car-Pooping Race, and get our brave and innovative automakers off their asses and help us get wastes out of our asses while in our cars.
We cannot abide a Car Toilet Gap! We must catch up, surpass, and succeed! Soon, we’ll all be pooping in our cars! For victory!
Top graphic image: USPTO; Seres
I skip the messy business and use Porta—Potty air fresheners in my cars.
“There’s one in every car… you’ll see”
(or in this case, #1 and #2! Ha ha)
Maybe Toyota can offer this in their new TuRD option package!
“ China Is Soundly Beating America In The In-Car-Pooping Arena And We Can’t Let This Happen”
We can totally let this happen.
I wonder what In-Car-Pooping paid for the naming rights.
Give India time to catch up.
The ribbed spots on the side of what you’ve identified as a “seat” are in fact foot grips. This is a squatting pan toilet, not a seated bowl toilet.
It’s going to be real hard to close the Car Pooping Gap, given the advantages of East Asian squatting toilets. Without all those dangly bits intruding into the bowl, a squat toilet pan can be low-profile, giving it incomparable compactness.
The only solution to the Pooping Gap is training and education! We need a national program to convert our restrooms to “Anglo-Indian” squat-sit combo toilets, so that every patriotic American can train for a future where the Pooping Gap no longer threatens our national bowels.
What happens with, you know, spatter?
Many squat pans have a cupped pee catcher in the front that is very effective (although I don’t see one here). Squatting leads to a lower anpproach angle for the urine stream, so it can disperse its energy with reduced splatter.
I spent a month in China in the 1980s, and it was different to say the least. The fancy facilities had a couple of bricks to put your feet on, and a rail to grab hold of for balancing.
I was ostensibly a vip – a crazy story in itself, I had more introductions to random officials than I can remember – and got to use Western toilets, which all seemed to be German style, which is a whole other thing.
Anyway, Chinese expectations would be different.
So they gave you a shelf toilet?! Jesus.
If you can’t use it while driving, what’s the point? If you still gotta stop, you might as well find a terlit or crap on the side of the road.
I have to be the wet blanket here and point out the receptacle in the Rolls-Royce is a champagne cooler intended to be filled with ice a bottle of Bollinger not excrement.
On the other the comments are gold.
I’m confused because Jason in that other article clearly implies that the auction describes it as having an evacuation mechanism, which would make it a toilet. Although the auction does say that it was only used for champagne. But why would one want to evacuate their bottle of champagne under the car? Is suppose it could be to empty ice…
It’s an example of the customer is always right, and that’s what the customer asked for. That car certainly was not built on spec, just look at it!
Also, the owner had staff to take care of things like that, and the staff’s great-grandparents would have been tasked with retrieving full chamber pots and dumping them out the window into the street.
My grandmother, who was both a suffragette and remarkably traditional, was always telling me as a child, “the gentleman always walks closer to the curb than the lady, in case someone empties a chamber pot into the street.” I have no idea where she picked up that notion; she grew up on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley in the 1900s, but the thought that someone might empty poop from the window of a high-rise has stuck with me.
This article is…the shit! Ha ha
These may be more popular among Euro”peans” Ha ha
I could see a system like this be useful for long haul truckers.
That 1954 Rolls is True Luxury – just jauntily drop your wastes literally on the peons.
Euro”peons?” These may be popular among Euro”peans” Ha ha
See the Dave Matthews band bus incident for reference
I’d forgotten about that, was an open metal bridge, no?
With a supremely unfortunate tour boat passing underneath.
You can’t tell me they didn’t dump that waste on them on purpose. The driver saying watch this and bums away.
As a kid, I genuinely wondered why we didn’t have holes in the seats of our car to allow us to do this directly to the street below. Get it out of your body and the car immediately and let the elements and vehicles behind you clean it up! Basically, a real life version of the car in the Spyhunter arcade game but the oil slicks are something else entirely.
Hopefully they keep going with this idea and don’t just half-ass it.
An unexpected article on an unexpected topic, and I’m a regular here, not bound up with odd expectations. This article really bowled me over. Quite excrement if you ask me.
No worries: the West beat China by 120 years. The Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Mass., features a French 1906 Charron-Girardet with an under-seat toilet and a sink.
What the Crap?
I think we all know the future involves an in-car toilet subscription.
An true “skat pack”…
Your resale value goes right down the crapper.
Two questions. How do you wash your hands and do you think your $#!+ doesn’t stink?
Basically, the Chinese don’t care about either.
I read about this and almost sent a tip email, then thought that surely there must be an Autopian staff member devoted to monitoring the intersection of fecal matter and automobiles.
You guys are a little late with your write up about route optimization for septic tank trucks, though.
https://www.satelliteindustries.com/blog/route-optimization-fuel-efficiency-for-growing-fleets/
Peak Autopian. Thank you, JT you are a national treasure.
This article shows that apparently you can polish a turd.
COTD
I can think of many occasions where having a crapper in my car would have saved me a lot of unwanted discomfort and/or embarrassment.
Consider the hazards involved with operating a manual transmission when the turtle’s head is poking at your underwear.
Or when you’re holding back an eruption of Krakatoa because you ate some bad jambalaya in Louisiana during a long drive.
Or maybe you downed a 2 lb bag of almonds within a 6 hour period, and now it wants to come out 20 hours later after you skipped using the rest stop commodes because there were no doors on the stalls(Texas was like that at one point). That one especially isn’t so nice.
Yeah, but it really ought to be under the drivers seat.
It’s still fairly common in rural north/West Texas to find gas stations that don’t have doors on the stalls, or even stalls at all. This is nearly always paired with a door that does not lock (and in some cases the bathroom door has been removed too). I don’t consider myself particularly poop-shy, but it’d have to be a true emergency in that case. Especially being said rural stations are usually fucking nasty, which I think is probably on purpose as another deterrent to doing drugs in there.
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. When you gotta’ go, well, nature sometimes says “FUCK YOU, GO HERE OR YOUR PANTS.” even when there’s an unwanted audience in the room and zero privacy for anyone sitting down to drop plant food out of their butt. Been in that situation enough times from middle school to present day that it no longer bothers me. But the first 5 times or so were very awkward and embarrassing. And it never did feel right or natural even to this day.
With regard to rural Texas, I’ve used doorless stalls in emergencies at both a Kountry Korner and a Shell gas station, getting intruded upon both times. Back in the early 2000s as a teenager, I also used an open ceiling rest stop in rural Texas where the toilets only had waist-high barriers with no stall doors, where you could see out of your peripheral vision everyone sitting beside you, and you were fully exposed from the front to anyone walking in. Fortunately, circa 2008 or so, that particular rest stop got upgraded with doors added to the laughably short stalls, but the stalls were still short and you could see over them as you sat, meaning everyone in there could see your face as you sat on the crapper pushing one out. There were a number of times where I had to go, and knowing that rest stop’s setup from previous uses, deliberately avoided using it in preference for a gas station miles up the road.
I didn’t really have much choice in the matter in any of those instances or I’d have held out for something better. An in-car crapper would have been such a massive improvement for those times, provided I was in the car alone.
I wonder if there have been any studies done comparing a person’s poop face to their sex face?
I wonder if we could get Torch some government grant money for that purpose.
I’m surprised you don’t appreciate the low weight and improved aerodynamics of doorless stalls. Eliminating that extra drag of manipulating a door when you gotta go, is an efficiency.
You’re talking about a few hundred milliseconds, at best.
30 years ago I was on a road trip to TX and stopped at a very rural gas station. It was clearly a converted house. I asked for the bathroom and the attendant pointed at what looked like a closet with cheap louvered bifold doors. It was a closet with bifold doors, but had a toilet installed in it.
In New Mexico some decades back as an early 20-something, I came across a gas station in the desert. I was desperate for a rest stop and was seriously considering pulling to the side of the two-lane highway and dropping trou in traffic, but I managed to encounter that building right on time.
I asked the clerk where the restroom was and she pointed me to an outbuilding. It was a wooden three-holer outhouse maybe 150 feet from the gas station. No door to the outside, no partitions between the holes, anyone could just walk around the corner and see the user(s) as they sat with their pants down. That was bad enough, but what stopped me from taking a seat was when I realized there was no toilet paper. There was a wooden peg on the far side at the smallest of the three holes to hold tp(the two other holes being larger than it and equal in size), but none was present. I looked for a Sears Roebuck catalogue as a substitute, but didn’t spot one.
I went back into the gas station and had to ask the lady operating the cash register for wiping material before using the facility. She could tell I was in dire straights as I waddled back in, cheeks clenched tight, and seeing my obvious distress she was quick to rip open a fresh pack of tissue to hand me a roll. She complained that someone must have stolen it from the holder again, and instructed me to bring it back when I was done. I barely made it back to the outhouse and the turtle’s head was almost touching cloth, so to speak. But I avoided a breach.
Not having other options, I gladly used it, with a glorious daytime view of the desert in front of me, facing away from the gas station and the highway. Fortunately, I was alone for the 15 minutes or so that I used it. I was actually trying to hurry because I didn’t want someone to walk up on me, but I also eat a lot, had been bunged up for days from being in a car, and well, you know how that goes. This was not a job I could rush, even though I was trying to rush it. The toilet paper was absolutely necessary after that; I’ll spare the details.
There was a hand pump for water outside that I washed my hands with. No soap.
I brought the roll back to the clerk as instructed. I also ended up filling my fuel tank there and buying some stuff(such as hand sanitizer).
That could have ended badly, but it turned out to be drama free.
1 out of 5 stars. The facility was clean and surprisingly without odor, the view of the desert was incredible, but if you’re not careful, you could get splinters on your rear, maybe get your dangly bits bitten by spiders, and if other people of either sex were to walk around the corner and/or accompany you, you’d have no privacy. Plus having to ask a clerk of the opposite sex for butt wipe, revealing the purpose for which I needed the facility, was hella awkward.
There is no bad jambalaya only people who can’t handle it
I eat habaneros whole and undiluted without issue. That particular jambalaya was comparatively very bland, and it gave me problems.
I know scatalogical humor is low-brow, but I nearly snarfed my iced coffee reading your oh-so-accurate post Toecutter! 😀
I think Torch would take offense to you calling this low-brow humor. Scatological humor is an art form that possesses the quality of universal relevance to the human condition, breaking down all cultural barriers without prejudice to race, age, religion, wealth, politics, or creed.
Your points are correct of course, and I’m sure that of all folks, Torch knows that ‘low brow’ isn’t necessarily a derogatory term. 😉
One correction and a comment: the patent number is CN224104011U not B60R15/04, like you say. The latter is the IPC classification, which is basically just a technology category. Patent offices use these classes to organize applications and help with examination.
There are also two different types of utility patents in China: an invention patent that undergoes formal examination and prior art searching by the patent office, similar to a utility patent here in the US and in Europe, and a “utility model” patent, which is what this is. Utility models are just a registration, no examination occurs, which is why they grant so quickly. While they are enforceable in theory just like an invention patent, they are prone to invalidation because of their lack of examination prior to grant. So if you’re worried that Seres is going to corner the market for car pooping in China, that may not actually be the case.
Heh, “prior art.”
I find it hilarious that China even has a patent system. Is that a joke of some kind?
Which category is it that the’re allowed to blatantly ignore and produce millions of cheap rip-off copies?
Oh, right, the category: US-patents.
Man, we can’t beat them at shit.
Let’s not waste time catching up, or our efforts will be down the pipes. Float or sink, we must do this!
Great, now the Chinese are also enshittifying their cars.
How is this story not part of the morning dump?
The morning dump is crap compared to this glorious pile.
The mid afternoon dumps are the memorable ones.
It’s two o’clock in midtown, and you need to find a parking spot and and a suitable room for a fecal deposit, and you only have $100.
Hotel lobbies are where it’s at for roadside dumps, especially mid day. The hotel is mostly empty so you’ll almost certainly have it to yourself, the bathroom was probably cleaned that morning, and then you can grab a coffee or cookie on your way out. Hell if it’s before 9am you can probably have some free breakfast too.
As a lifelong sales guy I am supremely disappointed I never thought of this. Hat tip to you good sir (or ma’am).
Done this before when the kids were toilet training. Haven’t done it for myself as I feel a bit guilty for using it not as a guest. Our go-to for non-rest area travel stops are big box home improvement stores. We spend enough $$$ at other locations that we have no guilt and my wife likes the fact that the women’s restrooms are usually quite clean due to the stores’ usual clientele.