Let's put this to bed now. As some of you were adamant about what was arguably quite obvious.
Straight from the horses mouth:
If Mercedes sidepod concept isn't the way to go, its not a problem to repackage the car into a new shape according to a confident Andrew Shovlin. As he put it "we can fit our car inside a lot of the cars"
Do you have absolute confidence it was the right way to go?
... We're very open minded about things. It isn't our belief that [extreme side pod design] is the fundamental problem, and even if it were, we can make our car bigger. Ultimately, our car can probably fit inside a lot of other cars on the grid. So, that's not a big repackaging exercise. But as I said, we're happy with the development decision we've done.
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1 ... mp4?tag=14
