This video, by Donut Media, is a really solid, 9 minute look at the history of flying cars. Yes, they do exist, but the chance of you having one is close to zero, unless you're a pilot with half a million bucks just lying around. Here's a look at a great sci-fi idea, and why it won't ever go mainstream.
George Jetson had a flying car that automatically folded into a briefcase. I saw them talked about in my dad's Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines in the 1970's. We all thought we'd have one by the year 2000. Luke Skywalker had his land speeder. It didn't fly, but it hovered and hauled ass, which was close enough. They were in Blade Runner. Doc's Delorean time machine became one in Back to the Future. And my personal favorite, Corben Dallas had a flying taxi in The Fifth Element. Flying cars, they've been in all kinds of sci-fi novels, movies, and a few TV shows for decades. So where the hell are our flying cars?
Corben Dallas' flying taxi, and a flying police car, in The Fifth Element (1997). Just for the record, taxi driving did actually get that crazy, at least when I was doing it. "Leloo multi-pass."
If you watch the video embedded above, you'll find out that the idea for flying cars goes back to when both airplanes, and cars themselves, were still new, in 1917. Those first attempts more like personal commuter airplanes. Eventually though, there have actually been a few vehicles that could drive legally on the road, and fly, as well. Mostly they were prototypes. But to answer that question above, here are our flying cars. If you have a pilot's license, and $400,000 or more to spend, you can get one of the 2 or 3 flying cars that are available, and legal in some places. The Terafugia Transition seems to be the top contender, over all, in real life. If you didn't quite put away $400K from your Gamestop stock trading wins, and you need to save up a bit more, here are 15 flying cars, or personal flying vehicles, that are either in the prototype stage or in the works (includes the ones in the previous video). As cool as these look, and may be to fly, none of them look or fly like George Jetson's car, or the other flying movie cars we've all seen.
But that brings us back to the question, if people have been thinking about, and actually designing, flying car concepts for over 100 years now, why aren't they in operation all over? And why isn't there some kind of small, vertical takeoff car that's easy to fly? With all the things that have been invented in 100 years, shouldn't somebody have come up with a legit flying car by now? How about this one?
This is my personal favorite of all the flying car ideas, the Moller Skycar. This test hover was in the 1990's, I believe. One of these even featured in a Clive Cussler novel, helping Dirk and Giordino escape some bad guys, in South America, as I recall. But, like most flying car ideas, there was a working prototype, but no models ever came to market.
Back in October of 2019, when many of the ideas in this blog were bouncing around my head, but hadn't been organized, I got this idea to go back and watch the trailers of the top 30 or 40 dystopian future movies, and TV shows, from the 1960's to the 1990's, and see how their imagined future compared with the real world in 2019. Much to my surprise, the original Blade Runner movie, a sci-fi classic, was set in Los Angeles in November of 2019, right when I started writing out these ideas. Not only a weird coincidence, but I realized that people my age (55/Gen X) are living in the future of our high school selves, when Blade Runner (and Mad Max II) came out.
The big lesson of watching all those futuristic movies was that while sci-fi writers come up with great stories and screenplays, and some really cool ideas for new technologies, they tend to suck at actually predicting the future. Crazy as it sounds, The Jetsons, created in 1962-63, has more technologies that actually came to be in the 21st century, than nearly all of the sci-fi movies and TV shows. I wound up writing a 20 chapter online book/blog about my thoughts, which included The Big Transition idea behind this blog (I recently added the "freakin'" part). You can see that here. There's a chapter about flying cars.
The first reason we don't have flying cars is the difference between writing and inventing. A science fiction writer, a comic book or graphic novel artist/writer, a movie screenplay writer, can imagine anything. The laws of science and physics don't apply. There should be a logic in the book or movie, so the fictional world seems believable to the reader or viewer. But you can break the actual laws of physics in some ways. Engineers and inventors in the real world can't. So the simple physical constraints of the real world keep us from having a flying car like Corben Dallas' taxi in The Fifth Element, for example. Although, Nikola Tesla talked about creating cars that actually hovered a foot above the ground, in the early 1900's, something like Luke Skywalker's land speeder. No one seems to know what forces he had in mind to do that, but he seemed to think that hovering cars (not hovercraft) were possible, it's in one of the books of his inventions He never created one, just talked about the possibility. But the Laws of Physics are a big reason we don't have George Jetson flying cars.
Another reason is that hybrid vehicles, like part car, part airplane, usually kind of suck at both things. They may work, but are not as good of a car, or of an airplane, as real cars and real airplanes. To make a vehicle do two completely different things, like this, or this, for example, usually lowers the abilities of the vehicle in both areas. But there are times when hybrid vehicles work for some uses, like this one did, back in World War II.
For the $400,000 it takes to buy the least expensive real flying car, you could buy a Cessna 172 airplane ($80K-$150K), a brand new Ford F-150 pick-up ($45K), and a used Lamborghini Gallardo ($110-150K). With what's left, you could take you pick of a good runabout boat (with a trailer), or a couple of jet skis (with trailer). So you can easily buy a great truck, a ridiculous sports car, a solid, dependable, used airplane, and a boat or jet skis, for what a real world flying car would cost you. Still want that flying car?
The Moller Air Car, which, let's face it, would be cool as fuck to fly around in, never came to market. The main reason is because designer/inventors are good at inventing, and often not good at other types of thinking. I'd call it more of a blind spot, than poor thinking. We all do this. My dad was a gifted draftsman and engineer, a true mechanical genius, so I witnessed this firsthand, growing up. Designers, inventors, and engineers think about really cool physical machines. That's good, that's what they get paid to do, think up, design, engineer, and plan all kinds of machines and mechanical systems, including vehicles. A good engineer will go to great lengths to design smart, efficient, durable vehicles. For example, my dad worked at Plymouth Locomotive Works in the late 1970's. The company went out of business in 1983, but many of their custom locomotives are still in service, 35-40 or more years later, like this one. That's good designing, engineering, and manufacturing.
But to design, build, and make something like that Moller Air Car, and make it into a widely used vehicle, takes a whole lot of things besides a functional, working, safe, flying car. And inventors, engineers, and designers just don't think of all those things. I think this is why sci-fi writers write amazing novels, comics, and make great movies, but create future worlds that will never happen in real life. They get hung up on the technology, but don't find social dynamics near as interesting. To predict a future society, you have to look at all the weird things that make up a society, mostly weird people. And most people spend most of their lives doing things that don't make much sense. Put all those things together, and you get a real (generally pretty dysfunctional) society. Meanwhile, designers, inventors, engineers, and techie writers and directors think mostly about machines, things that do make sense. To make flying cars a widespread thing, you have to not just create the car, you have to change society to create a place for that flying car.
First, someone has to fund the whole design and prototype process, which reportedly cost the Moller Air Car $110 million, or something close to that. So you need to sell the idea to people with a lot of money, to even get started. Engineers and inventors, for the most part, are not salespeople. Once you invent a functioning flying car, then it needs to prove its air worthiness. More time, more money, and... DUH, DUH, DUH... government regulators. They don't like new ideas.
Then, after all that work, you need to sell the idea that people actually need these things. OK, for the Moller Air Car, you could find a lot of people to back something that cool. But you will also have some kind of activist group trying to keep it from happening. Every good idea has lots of detractors, especially early on. Haters gonna hate, no matter how cool your idea is.
Then you need to fund, and build infrastructure, in society, somewhere, for that new vehicle. How do you fuel them? Where do they take off and land? Guess what, if your loud flying car takes off from your driveway... in your gated golf community filled with $2 million houses, some neighbors WILL NOT be happy. So you need some kind of airport. Then you need the FAA to first buy the idea, and then figure out needed regulations, and then add those aircraft to the tens of thousands of aircraft already flying, to keep the skies safe. Then you need insurance, for when things go wrong. And things always go wrong, at some point, even on well designed and built ideas. Ask NASA or Elon Musk.
Then, if it's really a great idea, politicians somewhere need to have their palms greased, to pass needed laws or ordinances. Then, after spending 35 years and $600 million (or whatever) getting to that point, you need to make enough money to pay alimony to your three ex-wives that left you because you loved your flying car more than them. What's that old saying, "If it floats, fucks, or flies... rent it, don't buy it."
Then you actually have to build a business to sell the flying cars. That takes more capital, engineers, salespeople, tech people, and all the rest. Then you have to sell enough of the things to get past the break even point, and actually pay a good return to your investors. Then you have to worry about competition making something similar, but without all the start-up costs you had to front.
It's not so much that a VTOL (vertical take off and landing) flying car isn't possible to build. The Moller Air Car, was there, 20 or more years ago. But you have to change a big chunk of how society operates to get the functioning flying car to a place where people can actually fly them as a recreational or commuter vehicle. Engineers, inventors, and techies love the tech, but generally not all the weird people you have to deal with to bring an idea this big into mainstream operation.
So why I'd love to fly around in a Moller Skycar, and buzz past the gridlocked 405 freeway below, there's little chance that will ever happen. So that's my take on how something, like flying cars, can seem like such a cool idea for 100 years, but never actually happen in a mainstream way.
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