I once lived in a mews house near Paddington station. Thus my garage (nee stable) was the full width of my house and just had room for may Ferrari 308GT. When the car started the house shook. Were I to live there today there would b just enough space for a carefully parked Model S. The space and electricity then so no problem fitting in 30 Conduit mews W2 3RE. It is a trifle fashionable now. It was less so in 1980.
It is rather interesting to see Model 3 take top sales honors in many such crowded places from England to Singapore. No wonder the reality is increasingly obvious.
The Hertz deal(s), related Uber and others coming are demonstrating the value of continuous vehicle monitoring, OTA updates and minimal maintenance.
We all might reflect on the easy use of Tesla products in dense environments that were more commonly associated with Twizzys, Bolloré and so on. Even with the very large Model 3 (yes! Very large in this inner-urban context.). Even in Singapore Bolloré, for example has been successful also with small urban delivery vans, just as a number fo EU manufacturers have been.
So, I think it is quite likely that at least one or two evolving Tesla vehicles will end out being destined for inner-city use. Probably they will never see US use, but they are likely to be successful in those markets in a way that Smart never was.
We have had the odd post on this subject, some by me, but nearly all of us simply have no idea what an ancient inner-city core actually is like, nor how enormously useful such vehicles are. None, thus far, have technology integration that can facilitate automation of 'the traveling salesman problem' which is, for those without a statistics background, one of the most challenging optimization problems in the pre-handheld-supercomputer days. Even today there si only minimal attention paid to such optimization. Tesla can make micro-evs explicitly incorporating such logic. Suddenly Tesla will justify higher initial price..and so much more, even insurance.
