Our long-term loan of a 2023 Toyota Sienna Platinum AWD has been a solid family hauler for many miles. But while its hybrid powertrain has been sipping fuel on long road trips, I’ve been sipping lots and lots of water. More than your average water bottle will hold. I’m pretty much always thirsty, which is why I bring along a really big water bottle — one that often doesn’t fit in your average cupholder. Maybe you also rock a 32-ounce Nalgene, or some other oversize container, and run into the same problem. Well, now I can tell you if that problem extends to the Sienna Minivan.
I’ll start up front, where there are a lot of cupholders.
It doesn’t fit in the two alongside the shift lever. There are a couple more right behind it, under a little flip-up cover.
It doesn’t fit in those, either. What about the ones built into the front door?
So many cupholders, so little girth! As you can now see, this minivan has caused problems for me. There’s no good place for me to put it while driving, so it often ends up rolling around it the front passenger footwell after it falls off the seat. Then I get thisrty — thirsty and mad!
How about all the passengers in the rear? Must they settle for wee baby water bottles as well?
These cupholders on the rear of the center console don’t do the trick, but there are a couple in the sliding doors that looks promising.
Tarnations! Wait … there are those weird flexible net-style ones on the side of the captain’s chairs. Maybe those will work.
The elastic at the top stretches just enough to fit around the bottom of the bottle, but you can’t shove it down any further — certainly not far enough for the bottle to stay put when the Sienna is in motion.
Help us third-row cupholders. You’re our only hope.
No. None of the cupholders in the Sienna can accommodate our oversized water bottle. Sometimes desperation will lead us to the seatback pockets behind the front row, but even those are too tight:
Again, that’ll just fall out while we’re driving.
It’s a shame because the rival Chrysler Pacifica’s cupholders play nice with big bottles. And we’ve seen other Toyota models that do, too, like the 4Runner and the rear cupholders in the last-gen Tundra. The consolation here is that what the Sienna lacks in cupholder quality, it makes up for in quantity. As Riswick showed in his Sienna interior storage review, you just have to bring a lot of inadequate normal-sized water bottles and fill all the cupholders in the van.
