The article refers to EV's that 'look like a phone booth on wheels' I suspect that refers to the BMW i3, we have a black and white one (panda edition) we refer to as our giant bathtub toy. We love it. I'm not sure the wh per mile is all that important as the cost to run any EV is so low that spending anything or giving up anything for an extra 25% efficiency is hard to pencil. EPA says i3 costs $.81 for 25 miles, biggest Tesla $1.14 for 25 miles. I ordered the car for myself but my wife ened up with it, I prefer my Dash E3. We paid $35K all in (rebates!).
The i3 is a nice car. BMW seems to rate it at around 220 wh per mile, but I wouldn't trust either number without a rigid test procedure.
http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/i/i3/2013/showroom/technical_data.html
The watt hour number goes mostly to range, for me, and the cost of the pack. Recently, companies like GM and Nissan have been saying they can get to around $150 per kWh on their packs. That would help. They want a 200 mile range, which means about a 60 kWh battery pack. You can see the numbers that every manufacturer is juggling.
Clearly, the Defiant is a three wheeler to fit in the Autocycle category, and maybe to go slim and light. You avoid most of the safety regs, apparently. Their costs are just too high, given the dated battery chemistry. But somebody could do this, make a lot, use the lower priced batteries, and maybe come in around $15,000. Some sort of small city car rented by the hour makes the most sense. It's hard to know what the self-guided car will mean.