The stupidity of the ‘spare bedroom’

The Tesla Model 3 is an astounding achievement, but one thing baffles me: why do electric cars lack even the most basic tea-making equipment? I can’t be the only Briton to wonder why you would travel around on top of a 75kwh, 360v lithium-ion battery without having the facility to plug in a kettle. Or indeed power an off-the-grid shack for a few days.

I have become oddly obsessed with questions like this because of the many lockdown hours I have spent watching bizarre YouTube videos. One remarkable series concerns the tiny house movement, where people seek to simplify and declutter their lives by moving into little wooden huts. I have always been interested in tiny homes, since it occurs to me that, with a certain amount of cunning design, it would be possible to produce effective micro-housing of extremely high quality — spending less money on land (which accounts for most of the cost of urban housing) and devoting far more attention to the design of the space and fitments.