Every April and every October I drive about nine hours from outside Lubbock up to Colorado Springs to see my daughter Beth and the grandkids, and both animals come along. Biscuit is the beagle mix, twenty eight pounds, six years old, and she gets carsick on the winding stretches. Juniper is the gray shorthair, nine pounds, four years old, and she howls for the first twenty minutes of any ride. On the back floor of the 2018 CR-V sits one canvas tote: the bowls, a folded litter box, a zip bag of her usual clumping litter, and a gallon jug of water from home. The bowls are the SLSON collapsible bowls, a two pack I bought in May 2025, the month after a drive where I spent the whole Raton stop holding a dish between my knees while Biscuit pulled toward a fence line.
I am not a gear person. I am a retired school bus driver who wants the drive quiet and the cleanup short. I have bought gear before that I used twice and then moved to a shelf in the garage, and I am not proud of it. But I have used these bowls on three Colorado drives now, plus state park weekends and more vet runs than I care to count, and I have opinions. Here are ten reasons they keep their spot in that tote.
The two pack that lives in my tote, April and October
Twelve ounces per bowl, folds to half an inch, clips to the tote handle so it never rolls under a seat. Current price is on the listing.
Amazon Check Today's Price on Amazon →They fold to half an inch and disappear into the tote
Folded, each bowl is about half an inch tall. Expanded it is roughly five inches by three and a half, standing two inches deep. The pair takes up less room in my tote than a paperback novel. The first spring I owned them I forgot they were in there and found them again in June, still flat and fine, no cracks at the fold lines. I have unfolded and refolded the blue one, Biscuit's, more times than I can count since May 2025, and the fold lines still sit flat as the day they came out of the package.
Two bowls means the dog and the cat quit sharing
One for Biscuit, one for Juniper. Before this I carried a single dish and spent every stop refereeing who got there first. Juniper is nine pounds and does not win arguments, so she drank last and drank little. Two bowls fixed a problem I had been managing badly for years without ever naming it. Now the blue one goes down for Biscuit and the green one goes down a few feet away for her, and nobody has to be the bad guy.
The carabiners keep them off the floor mat
Each bowl comes with a clip. Mine stay hooked to the tote handle, which means nothing rolls under the seat, nothing gets stepped on at a rest stop, and nothing ends up wedged behind the spare tire until November. The clips are plain carabiners, nothing clever, and the tote handle is where both bowls live. I have never once had to hunt for a bowl in the back of that CR-V, and I have hunted for plenty back there.
Twelve ounces covers a nine hour drive in one fill
Twelve fluid ounces per bowl. At the Raton stop, the long one where I walk both animals and eat a sandwich, one fill does Biscuit for the whole break. She leaves maybe an inch in the bottom. I used to pour water three separate times on that stop because she would knock the dish over and then look at me like I had done it on purpose.
They hold food too, a cup and a half at a time
The listing says a bowl holds a cup and a half of food, and I have tested that with kibble. It is honest. Twice I forgot Biscuit's dinner bowl at home and used one of these instead, and it did the job without her shoving it across Beth's guest room floor. Water one day, dinner the next, rinse and fold in between.
Rinsing one takes about ten seconds
At a gas station sink I unfold one, rinse it, shake it out, fold it, clip it back on the tote. It takes less time than washing my hands. These are soft plastic, no odor out of the package, and nothing has stained or gone tacky in eighteen months of hard West Texas water and cheap soap. I have never put them in a dishwasher and I would not.
Three and a half ounces you will never notice
Each bowl weighs about a hundred grams, so the pair runs a little over seven ounces together. That is roughly two decks of cards. If your shoulders are older than your ambitions, that number is the whole argument. It is lighter than the water bottle I used to carry, and it does not require me to hold anything while a dog pulls toward a bush.
They do not leak into your bag
The travel bottle with the flip out trough is what I owned before. It leaked into the bottom of my bag on a state park weekend and I threw it out the month the SLSON bowls arrived. A bowl that folds has no valve to fail. Nothing has ever leaked out of these onto the tote, the mat, or my good canvas bag.
They earn their keep at the state park, not just the car
I use these on a picnic table, on the tailgate while I load groceries, and in a cabin at a state park. Last October we took a cabin for two nights, and the bowls sat on the counter the whole time, rinsed and refolded each morning. The listing recommends them for camping, car, crate and hiking, and for once that matches how a person actually uses the thing. They are not car only gear that sits in a cupboard ten months a year.
Two year warranty and thirty thousand ratings behind them
The warranty runs two years. The listing carries more than thirty one thousand ratings and sits at four point seven. I do not buy on numbers alone, but when a small folding piece of plastic has that many people behind it, the odds of it being junk drop considerably. Mine are at eighteen months with no failure, no split, no leak.
What I'd Skip
I would skip buying one pack for one animal and a second pack a month later. Get the two pack once. I would also skip any soft travel bowl you cannot clip to something, because a bowl loose in a car becomes a bowl under a seat, and under a seat is where water goes to ruin a floor mat. The SLSON pair answers both of those with a clip and a fold, and it has not asked anything of me since.
And here is the honest part. If your animal will not drink out of an unfamiliar bowl at all, these will not fix that. Juniper barely drinks until we reach Beth's house. Eighteen months in, that has not changed and I do not expect it to. The bowls made the dog's side of the trip easier. They did not make my cat a different cat.
Biscuit drinks at every stop now instead of waiting until we get there. That is the whole review. The rest is convenience.
Two bowls, one tote hook, eighteen months of drives
Folds to half an inch, holds twelve ounces or a cup and a half of kibble, weighs three and a half ounces. The pair I would buy again tomorrow.
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