So, you agree that the ability to drive it on roads is not an essential feature of a flying car?
Nope. My understanding is that it was shown doing so in the 1985 series and in The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones movie. Many cars in the 1985 series backgrounds have wheels, in fact.
By flying to visit grandma, do you mean drive your flying car to a local airport, log your flight plans, pay for runway usage, then fly to grandma’s local airport, and then drive to her house?
Depends on whether you are talking about flying cars the dream or flying cars the transportation.
Many flying car inventors conceded that the dream was impractical, but thought that having the equivalent of a private plane, only with more function, was appealing. This was especially true after WWII when so many returning soldiers had some flight training. The craft were touted as being convertible in a matter of minutes, barely interrupting the journey. Few if anyone were so foolish to market a flying car to lift into the sky in the middle of a traffic jam and soar away. War pilots knew too much about the idiosyncrasies of planes.
Although flying car is the omnipresent public term, people in the business make a distinction between a flying car - an automobile tricked out so it can fly - and a roadable aircraft - an airplane with a undercarriage that allows movement on roads. You will almost never hear roadable aircraft outside the specialized community; the term has no familiarity, let alone magic. A Google ngram shows that “roadable aircraft” has barely been mentioned at any time since the start of the 20th century except for a slight bump in the 1940s, whereas “flying car” use has soared since 1990.
The best history of flying cars in the 20th century is Flying Cars by Patrick J. Gyger. Available pretty cheaply on eBay.
Look ma… no wings!
If we’re talking about things that we were promised in the future, I think I’d prefer a jet pack.
At $300K each, I predict they will not be flying off dealer’s showroom floors in any great quantity.
And that’s before the inevitable cost growth when they try to actually make and sell the things.
As I said many years ago, and I maintain to this day, an affordable “flying car” available to the general public, whether it be a vehicle that only flies or one that drives to the airport and then flies away to its destination, will be the end of civil aviation in this country.
Real airplanes cost a fortune to own, fuel/power, and maintain. They do not tolerate deferred or extended maintenance intervals, nor does the FAA. Someone with a “flying car” in their driveway having to choose between food, housing, and the 1000-hour required maintenance is going to defer or ignore that maintenance just like they do with their cars, only with their “flying car” it won’t just break down and allow you to pull over to the side of the road, it’s going to fall out of the sky. Multiply that by the thousands of owners doing the same thing and the skies will be literally raining death every day. That will not be tolerated. The FAA will never allow that to happen. They will remain toys of the rich and they will be licensed as aircraft, which kinda makes you wonder what the point is.
Why don’t you buy one?
https://jetpackaviation.com/jetpacks/
I think you’re looking at it exactly backwards: An affordable flying car available to the general public would be one that remains safe and reliable even with the typical (almost nonexistent) level of maintenance the public is willing to tolerate. If we don’t have that yet (and I agree that we most certainly don’t), then we don’t have “an affordable flying car available to the general public”.
That’s why every “flying car” scheme has failed, because they’re all solving the wrong problem. What problem they’re solving varies from one to another, but when people say “we want flying cars”, what they mean is that they want aircraft that are as cheap and easy to maintain as cars. And nobody’s ever delivered that, so the public keeps on complaining “Where are the flying cars we were promised?”.
The pubic has never wanted affordable flying cars. What they always dreamed of were magic cars, flying carpets with comfortable seating, air conditioning, and a roof.
If you remove the condition for affordability, we already have those.
But affordable ones.
Why would I dream of a bad car that can become an even worse plane? Or a cramped, uncomfortable plane that can take up space in my driveway? Or a weird unpleasant car that can become a terrifying hovercraft?
These are my dreams, I want something nice, not a $300,000 collection of compromises.
People dreamed of quick, easy transportation for a long time. The mass produced cars of the pre-WWI era were buckets of bolts by modern standards but they thrilled the public. People dreamed of flying for a long time. When airplanes started commercial flights the whole world panted for them, even though by modern standards they weren’t much better than what Snoopy flew in WWI.
The early cars succeeded at being cars. The early airplanes succeeded at being airplanes. The early flying cars failed at both. All a flying car had to do was be good enough at being a flying car. That would have been sufficiently magic. None of them were. So everybody kept dreaming of something in their driveway that gave them the magic once supplied by the car and the plane.
Clarke’s famous quote is apt here: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He meant that in a different way, of course. But if you read that as “Any sufficiently advanced technology feels like magic,” you have the explanation for the Apple II and the iPhone and other now obsolete products that hit psyches with the force of magic in their day.
Great intro to the post I’ve been meaning to write. Thank you!
What 2026 people want is an app on their phone that orders a Star Trek style near-instant teleportation to their destination. With their pile of paraphernalia at their feet here and also when they rematerialize there.
Flying is just a means to the end. With the supposed advantages over driving of greater speed & less congestion. Shame about weather, cost, complexity, and general impracticality.
Also the greater rotor downwash. Greater than helicopters, that is. Which is another reason they won’t be landing on ordinary streets or driveways.
Let’s face it. Flying cars are never going to happen, even if they perfect AI flying so they virtually never crash.
In a post-scarcity world with 100x current world GDP and a very flat income / wealth distribution I could easily see AI-driven flying eVTOL thingies as everyone’s birthright.
In any economic world humans will build? Fugeddaboudit!