There is a 'milk-float' around here that has been 'tuned' and is fitted with larger wheels and tyres and is used as personal transport rather than for delivering milk and eggs (and fruit juice, yoghurt and potatoes etc).
You
would imagine that since the 1950s that technology had improved sufficiently to make such vehicles viable for commuting (though, to be fair, if you were a milkman you probably already consider it as suitable).
It would be interesting to know how much a 'passenger' version of the standard electric milk-float would cost (and how much electricity is needed to recharge the batteries - and at what cost).
Vehicles such as the Tesla are not cheap, but they are, at the present, 'bespoke' vehicles rather than series production (I believe that there were very few manufacturers responsible for producing milk-floats so volumes would be quite large). A lot of the cost of 'newfangled' electric cars is amortised development cost of course.
http://www.teslamotors.com/
I believe that there is a Scandinavian company producing a small electric car, but this limits the size of battery that can be carried and therefore the performance and range (milk floats are heavy beasts):-
http://en.think.no/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th!nk_City
There's also an Indian model:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REVA
I don't think we'll be seeing long-distance trunkers just yet though.