For space taken up on the road, being half a meter shorter or longer doesn’t make much of a difference, since the distance between cars is much larger. And for parking, being as tall as a person greatly reduces street visibility for pedestrians. Don’t get me wrong, this car is much better than a truck or SUV, but it is not ‘tiny’.
I found that moderate compression (like zstd-2 or -3) not only increases your effective storage capacity, but increases R/W speeds for HDDs.