[genewitch]

And it was caused by a profit-seeking behavior - an assumption that most, if not all people, would wait to drink the coffee until after they were out of the vehicle, which could be up to X minutes; as such they wouldn't want cold or lukewarm coffee. If most people equated mcdonalds coffee with "bad lukewarm coffee", less people would go to mcdonalds for anything, including coffee. I forget how hot they served the coffee, but it was up around 95C/200F. I know that you have to specifically request "extra hot" at places like SB and CB&TL, otherwise you get coffee hot enough to still be "hot coffee" after adding creamer, i venture 130F or so. AFAIK McDs doesn't offer "extra hot" coffee. Once bitten, and all.

I don't know about the changes made due to this lawsuit, but i reckon they changed their cups to keep ~120F coffee at that temperature longer.

edit: aside: I just realized why i prefer Fahrenheit even though i understand Centigrade. Stuff over 100F is "hotter than i am" It's intuitive in a way that merely remembering 37 is body temp (my dad was born in '37 so that's why i remember) and "anything over 40 is hot" doesn't really roll off the tongue, even though it's roughly as accurate as my ">100F is hot"