Paint suggestions to color match plastics

[mars]

If you have 3D printing skills and equipment could you not produce a 3-sided rectangle (with a curved design on the 2 longer straights) with a base to replicate the standard handbrake tray, which could be adhered to the existing handbrake hump with the 12v socket. No expert on these things but it’s probably worth investigating what’s possible.

Well, that'll be a short investigation, as this idea stemmed precisely from someone having done just that! This on the right was posted two years ago over at the Audi A2 Owners Group Facebook page.
As far as your questions about cost and finish go, it's sold for £50 which I'm pretty sure includes a hefty margin over pure filament costs, and as you can see, it fits pretty well in the interior with its "natural finish" (far as I know would be very difficult and require extremely expensive equipment to even attempt with 3D printing anyway).
I wanted to try my hand at making use of the wasted space by the front and fix the pretty basic geometry that causes the transition with the handbrake hump to be quite awkward. So then I thought that remaking the entire panel would eliminate this last problem and enable me to place the USB ports by the cig lighter socket (so they're accessible by both front and rear passengers) and potentially even expand the tray to a bit around the handbrake.

As for the hole in the tray, I modeled a correct size storage compartment in Blender, 3D-printed and painted it black. Some remarks I noticed; as you said it's really small and nothing really fits it. It should also be printed in ABS as the usual PLA and PET filaments start to bend and deform even in Finnish summer temperatures. I can share the Blender file if someone wants to try printing it. It's better than a hole in the tray but I don't think there's much use for that size compartment other than it looks better.

Thanks for the useful info, and I'll gladly take you up on your offer!

I'm going to model something more useful for the tray hole anyway in the near future so I you some have clever ideas please share.

I was considering coin or ticket slots, perhaps those could work?

 

[RantA2]

I'll think about the suggestions and come back to the topic some other time.

Here's a link to the documents, both .blend and .stl.