Cupholders are designed for disposable cups from fast food e.g. coffee cups from Starbuck/McDonalds, soda from 7/11, plastic water bottles. A lot of reusable water bottles store much more liquid in shapes that are more symmetric or even bottom heavy to ensure greater stability. These disposable cups go straight from the restaurant, to the car, and to the trash.
FWIW, I love my BottlePro2 [0] for my Nalgene's, I have a few of them and they fit into my glove box when I need to pull them out.
This was a joke mostly. I have no issue setting the bottle on the back seat or something. I'm a bit of a nalgene and water fan.
The risk with a bottle on the seat is that it can roll off, slide under the driver seat and then obstruct the pedals.
My 2016 Golf's door pockets are perfectly sized for a 1L nalgene.
Dont know the bottle, but thats a bad designed bottle then.
That seems unfairly knee-jerk. Nalgene bottles are very good at doing the thing they were designed to do- being water bottles for hiking (it's fairly noteworthy when I see a hiker drinking out of something other than a Nalgene bottle). To fit in cupholders, they'd have to have a much smaller diameter, and thus either hold much less water, or have a "layered" shape (like the large drink sizes from fast food restaurants). Either of these would be a major compromise.
Nalgene bottles are also nigh-on indestructible. I don't know if they still do, but at one point they had an "if you can break it, we'll replace it"-level warranty). Having the layered shape would compromise the structure you get from the regular cylinder.
Moreover Nalgene water bottles became popular for consumer use (previously they were a laboratory equipment company) in the 70s according to Wikipedia. I believe that well predates the rise of cupholders in cars.
Yep - you can still buy the original HDPE lab version by the case: Part number 2104-0032
Furthermore, they have lids.
And they always fit perfectly in outdoors activity vehicles with "cupholders", like kayaks!
They're typically 1 liter plastic cylinders for holding (in/out) water. I've seen a few cupholders where they did fit. You can find cheap adapters where they don't.