Some people buy cars strictly on emotion. They fall in love with it and will buy it regardless of utility. I'm certainly not one of those people and I suspect most people aren't, either. Cars are just too expensive for that. I'm much more intersted in airplanes than cars, but even then utility ranks higher with me than emotion. Sure, I'd love to own a genuine Supermarine Spitfire (or even a good replica) but even if I had the money, I doubt I'd buy one.

I keep mentioning two seat cars instead of single seaters primarily because of utility. The utility of a single seater is just too low to justify the purchase, to me at least. A two seater would allow me to carry my wife. It'll probably have enough space to carry groceries and other small purchases. A single seater wouldn't.

About the only 2 seat cars sold in America are sports cars and the Honda Insight. Sports cars are for car lovers. They're fun to drive (except on snow). The Honda Insight offers the highest gas mileage of any car sold in America but is quite rare on the road, at least here in Colorado where I've only seen a couple over the past few years. Not only is the performance (acceleration & handling) for the Insight pretty poor, it's overall utility isn't that great, either. There may be a lot more of them in sunny states like California and Florida but they don't seem to sell well here.

Bad weather handling ability depends on several things, such as ground clearance and weight. Even having front wheel drive doesn't help very much if the car has poor clearance. When I moved to Colorado 20 years ago, I had a Honda Civic. It was front wheel drive but easy to get stuck in more than a few inches of snow because the car would get "high centered". It's light weight made it more vulnerable to getting stuck. By contrast, my wife's car at the time was rear wheel drive but heavy ('66 Chevy Biscayne - prototype for the M-1 tank). It didn't get stuck.

Look at the map and you'll see a lot of the country where bad weather handling ability is a must. It's a critical factor in any purchase decision I make and I'm certainly not alone in that regard. Still, I suspect that a well engineered ultracompact that was crash-worthy, handled bad weather, and got really good mileage would likely sell very well.