Regularly? No. Most people aren't regularly taking helicopters anywhere, in part because their ability to fly around New York usually requires VFR conditions.
Occasionally? Yes. If you live in Harlem and need to get to JFK, you're paying an outsized time tax to get to and through Grand Central or Penn Station compared with taking the West Side Highway down to the 30th Street heliport. If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.
(I'm ignoring the outer boroughs and New York's surrounding suburbs, for whom this could actually be a game changer.)
> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it is a dumb car for rich people
Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.
We will see what happens the first time one of them crashes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Hudson_River_helicopter_c...
https://abc7ny.com/post/mta-driver-injured-bus-crashes-store...
... Eh? The very successful Nissan Leaf (for quite a long time the best-selling electric car in the world) came out the year after the Tesla Roadster. The Renault Zoe (again, quite successful) came out about a year after that, if you're really hung up on the 'west' thing.
Tesla never meant to sell it in large numbers, and they probably couldn’t have made many more anyway. And this still represented around $3bn if revenue and helped get Tesla off the ground.