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> This is an embarrassingly poor design effort. You are completely missing what this is about and the segment this is targeting. This is not a small car design

by brmgb 6y ago

> This is an embarrassingly poor design effort. You are completely missing what this is about and the segment this is targeting. This is not a small car designed for the American market. This is not even a small car in the European sense. This clearly is targeting the segment filled by scooters and small motorcycles. European urban driving has little in common with American urban driving. Cities are compact and very dense with little to no parking space and speed limit at 30km/h to 50km/h. You are never going to get close to highway speeds driving inside a city in Europe.

bborud 6y ago
I live in Europe. I spend most of my driving time in and close to the city. The sole reason I need a car is that I often need to get from one side of the city to the other. That usually means ring roads and similar, which have higher speed limits and even higher actual speeds driven. Which means I need both something that won't cause a traffic jam there, AND something that is small enough to navigate and park in the city. A lot of people also live just outside the city core and commute by car into the city. This too means roads with higher speed limits than the actual top speed of this car. Which means, it becomes a problem. I live in a country where 5.6% of cars are electric. (By comparison, California has 1.3% electric cars). In part because of exactly this need to combine inner city and the periphery around the city. Authorities try to get cars out of the city, which is why they provide tax incentives to at least switch to electric for those who can't switch to public transport. If we talk about people who only navigate inner cities, electric bicycles, scooters and small motorcycles are preferable from a traffic point if view since they are much more effective. They take up much less space on the road, require less parking space and can navigate the city much faster. (In the summer it is faster to navigate across the city on an electrical bicycle than it is to drive any car regardless of size) From a government perspective, this car doesn't solve a problem. It creates new problems by increasing the space requirements and by putting new demographics into new settings. Dramatically so if the car were to be successful. From a consumer perspective it does offer more comfort for a narrow sliver of affluent teenagers, and a possible service vehicle for companies, municipalities etc. For someone who needs a car anyway this is a typical second or third car - which means we fail to shrink down the fleet; it just grows larger. Its _only_ qualities are size and aesthetics. It falls short in every other respect.
- brmgb 6y ago
  > From a consumer perspective it does offer more comfort for a narrow sliver of affluent teenagers, and a possible service vehicle for companies, municipalities etc. I like how you casually toss that. This is not a detail. This is the core market of the car and it has been perfectly designed to address it. This is a clean, compact, two seaters with a size and performance profile perfectly suited for a city looking like Paris. It's probably going to make a killing as a ride sharing solution. It's a very interesting new value proposition (small, slow, clean, quite cheap) and it does so using an extremely aggressive engineering proposition (only 250 parts, perfectly symmetrical, similar front and back). This car is a design master class. The fact that you fail to see that is on you. Meanwhile it is selling very well.
  - bborud 6y ago
    Why do you assume that I don’t see that and people have not done made simple and cheap cars before? The difference is scale. Making a car relevant for a narrow demographic isn’t very impressive. Making a car that makes mobility for the masses is. I would encourage you to look a bit closer at cars that did this in the past.

by brmgb 6y ago

bborud 6y ago

I live in Europe. I spend most of my driving time in and close to the city. The sole reason I need a car is that I often need to get from one side of the city to the other. That usually means ring roads and similar, which have higher speed limits and even higher actual speeds driven. Which means I need both something that won't cause a traffic jam there, AND something that is small enough to navigate and park in the city. A lot of people also live just outside the city core and commute by car into the city. This too means roads with higher speed limits than the actual top speed of this car. Which means, it becomes a problem. I live in a country where 5.6% of cars are electric. (By comparison, California has 1.3% electric cars). In part because of exactly this need to combine inner city and the periphery around the city. Authorities try to get cars out of the city, which is why they provide tax incentives to at least switch to electric for those who can't switch to public transport. If we talk about people who only navigate inner cities, electric bicycles, scooters and small motorcycles are preferable from a traffic point if view since they are much more effective. They take up much less space on the road, require less parking space and can navigate the city much faster. (In the summer it is faster to navigate across the city on an electrical bicycle than it is to drive any car regardless of size) From a government perspective, this car doesn't solve a problem. It creates new problems by increasing the space requirements and by putting new demographics into new settings. Dramatically so if the car were to be successful. From a consumer perspective it does offer more comfort for a narrow sliver of affluent teenagers, and a possible service vehicle for companies, municipalities etc. For someone who needs a car anyway this is a typical second or third car - which means we fail to shrink down the fleet; it just grows larger. Its _only_ qualities are size and aesthetics. It falls short in every other respect.

brmgb 6y ago
> From a consumer perspective it does offer more comfort for a narrow sliver of affluent teenagers, and a possible service vehicle for companies, municipalities etc. I like how you casually toss that. This is not a detail. This is the core market of the car and it has been perfectly designed to address it. This is a clean, compact, two seaters with a size and performance profile perfectly suited for a city looking like Paris. It's probably going to make a killing as a ride sharing solution. It's a very interesting new value proposition (small, slow, clean, quite cheap) and it does so using an extremely aggressive engineering proposition (only 250 parts, perfectly symmetrical, similar front and back). This car is a design master class. The fact that you fail to see that is on you. Meanwhile it is selling very well.
- bborud 6y ago
  Why do you assume that I don’t see that and people have not done made simple and cheap cars before? The difference is scale. Making a car relevant for a narrow demographic isn’t very impressive. Making a car that makes mobility for the masses is. I would encourage you to look a bit closer at cars that did this in the past.