I don't want to seem the skeptic here or anything. Truly, I believe that the Elio and other vehicles like it deserve a place on our roads, but I don't believe that this vehicle is any more likely to revolutionize transportation than the very, very many other pioneering vehicles that came before it.
Think about it this way, even if the Elio hits the road as intended, as of 2011 (last pertinent data) the government estimates that there are
253,108,389 registered, high-way legal vehicles on the road. Even if all 15,000 reserved Elios, that haven't even been built yet, are on the road at some point in the near future they are still such a tiny fraction of the total number of overbuilt SUVs and lifted trucks as to be statistically insignificant in the grand transportation picture.
What Elios doesn't seem to understand is that people like us, we're all nerds and misfits. We see a vehicle that we might like to own and immediately head to the mileage projections and drive train description. Most of the rest of the world won't get past the pictures of the single seat. Quite a few of them will see an ad for this vehicle and set it near the top of their personal road-rage vendetta list.