Teslas no good for taxis

Here's an mildly interesting one:

I have a customer account at my local taxi company. I don't drive, so I use taxis regularly, and I get discounts for sticking with the same taxi company.

Yesterday, I received an email telling me that, as a premium customer, I was entitled to special requests when I book a ride: all I had to do was tell them my preferences and they would be applied for free whenever possible when I need a driver.

So I told them I preferred non-smoking drivers, and I didn't want to ride in a Tesla vehicle.

A rep emailed me today and told me they couldn't guarantee that the driver would always be a non-smoker because if there's no other driver available around, they'd have to send a smoker to give me a ride. But they could guarantee that I would never ride in a Tesla, because they had no Teslas in their fleet.

Why I asked? Because drivers quickly found out that the hidden door handles were a problem for many customers who can't open the door themselves, and while the driver always tried to open the door for the customers, it wasn't always possible if there are many riders and/or many pieces of luggage to load in the trunk.

Interesting... I never thought about that, and obviously neither did the Tesla engineers. They basically locked themselves out of a market trying to be fancy instead of being practical.