Utterly stupid design. The engineers oughta be shot. OK, not really. But you get the point.
What kind of idiot designs a vehicle that cannot be entered in the rain without exposing the entire front cabin area to the rain?
Fools.
Are you referring to the front entry, or the rear seat entry?
Almost any car has precip enter the cabin if there is wind.
And as for the engineering: the article describes their motivation: weight reduction.
Once again, per the comments I made on another high-MPG thread today: they need a better transmission. These five-speeds ain’t gonna get the maximum fuel mileage out of a diesel. Diesels have pretty narrow optimum RPM bands, and the job of any auto engineer using a diesel should be to put enough gears into the tranny to maximize the number of miles spent at optimum RPM, regardless of actual road speed.