Will there ever be flying cars?
(I apologize if this has already been asked, but I am a brand new member and it wouldn’t let me search to see.)
Penumbrax, welcome to the Straight Dope. Since it is speculative, this question is best suited to our forum called In My Humble Opinion.
Colibri
Moderator
Welcome, Penumbrax. It depends on what you mean by flying car - would a personal airplane count? If not, what makes it different than a flying car?
But actually, it probably doesn’t depend on what you mean. There certainly will be flying cars sometime, and there already are depending on how you want to define them. But I don’t think you’ll ever see personal flying cars replace regular cars. There are too many challenges with the engineering, cost, and safety. Those are surmountable challenges if there was a good enough reason to tackle them, but I think other transportation options will make a flying car not the preferred choice.
There already are flying cars and there have been since the 1940’s. The Aerocar may not be what you had in mind though.
There are currently at least two companies with flying prototypes of flying cars that they eventually plan to put into production. Terrafugia has been testing their models for years already and they have some really high-tech designs in the long-term pipeline. AeroMobile is another real company with flying prototypes. Then, there is the perpetual garage project, the Moller SkyCar that has been in development for decades and will likely stay that way because it is the work of a lone eccentric inventor and his design is hopelessly complex.
That said, the real answer to your question is probably not at least not on a large scale. Just because flying cars can be built doesn’t mean that the average person will ever drive or fly even one. The 3D traffic and safety concerns are still thought to be so complex that they are prohibitive on a mass scale. We don’t have the infrastructure to support large numbers of flying cars buzzing around over populated areas and no one that I know of is working on that problem at the level it would take to support widescale adoption.
Probably yes – I am sure by the end of the century. But an energy revolution needs to happen first.
This. People sharing ‘flying car’ articles on FB and other places say it’s OK. You don’t even need a license. Ain’t gonna happen. Rules are already in place, and they’re not going to change them to allow unlicensed people to fly in national airspace.
Crashes are inevitable, and the carnage would be glorious! I think the people who are really looking forward to flying cars are the lawyers.
Indeed. Where do flying cars take off and land? If you have to use an airport anyway, why not just get an airplane? You can get a flying car with almost the payload capacity, and the same speed, as a Cessna 152. You can get a 150/152 for $20,000 to $30,000. A flying car is in the $200,000 range. For that much, you can get a lightly-used four-seat Cessna 172 Skyhawk or Piper PA-28 Cherokee Arrow that’s faster and has a greater range and payload capacity. Or you could get a first-cycle, lower-mid-time Robinson R22 helicopter.
EDIT: Smithsonian Channel, The Invention of the Flying Car
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Flying cars are never going to be a mass-market item.
Fuel is going to do nothing but get more expensive, air space is already too crowded, and people can barely drive an automobile, never mind a plane.
It’s just a fantasy.
good lord, I hope not, given our ineptness in competently handling non-flying cars.
New energy and propulsion - and a way of producing of lift which doesn’t require a 20-30’ long wing.
The Rogalla Wing might be adaptable, but current implementations (ultralights and parasails) can’t be used for real machines.
People have been inventing flying cars for 100 years. They will undoubtedly keep on doing so.
But the OP probably meant to ask if flying cars will ever become average everyday transportation. And that answer is no, never.
My cultural history of Flying Cars is a good, non-technical place to start on the history of the delusion.
(Note that the one-star review is because it’s too short, as if telling people it’s 33 pages weren’t a clue. Thanks a bunch, reviewer.)
Unless there is a revolutionary power source, i.e. **Mr. Fusion**™, no.
Automobiles are big, heavy, steel-framed, passenger-comfort-and safety-first-designed vehicles. Airplanes are very light, designed-for-their-environment-first vehicles, so never the twain shall meet. We will have autonomous, self-driving automobiles long, long before flying ones (if ever)…
My guess is that they could become a useful niche form of transportation.
I’m thinking of something along the lines of a scaled-up multi-engine drone, pilotless & semi-autonomous, used for short-range (say, up to 15-mile) transport for one or two passengers. You’d summon one with a smartphone app. It would need charging stations but no complex ground infrastructure.
Current technology is easily capable of controlling a fleet of these in a way that avoids collisions and conflicts. They would be restricted to low altitudes (< ~400’) to avoid conflict with airplanes.
This would require advances in battery technology (long anticipated, not yet arrived). But Amazon and others are working on the idea of drones delivering packages. Think of this as a scaled-up version of that.
Here’s a list of the last dozen or so times we rehashed this question.
Assuming flying cars were even affordable, the cost of insurance, maintenance, annual certifications, etc. would be prohibitive to drivers wanting to take to the sky.
People underestimate how much space flying machines require. A Robinson R22 is the smallest certified helicopter I know of that is in production. It’s just under 29 feet long and has a rotor diameter of more than 25 feet. Something like you propose would be bigger. While VTOL aircraft can get into pretty confined places, it’s not as if they can land in a fitted box. You’re going to need a space a couple of times bigger than the vehicle. Next, VTOL aircraft don’t just go straight up in the air. It works for toys because nobody gets killed if something goes wrong. Helicopters take off by coming into a hover, and then moving forward until they get into translational lift, and then continue the take-off profile. See: height-velocity diagram. It applies to landing as well as take-off. If a helicopter is flying in the shaded areas, the pilot is taking a (calculated) risk. You’re not going to be able to click on an app and have a flying Uber pick you up at Pike Place Market or a club on Sunset Blvd. A landing pad isn’t ‘complex’, but it does require space that is at a premium in the very places you’d want to have the service. And you’d have to get rid of all of those buildings on the approach and departure ends. Of course the ‘flying cars’ we see today require much more space, since they need a runway to take off and land.
The good news is that such take-off and landing areas already exist – though many people don’t want them to. If you have to go to an airport anyway, airplanes and helicopters can supply your transportation needs. And the ‘flying’ part that everyone is interested in, is something they do better than roadable aircraft.
‘Flying cars’ (roadable aircraft) will spend much of their time on the ground. In traffic. There’s zero chance that collisions won’t happen. Steel wins over aluminum egg shells ever time. If you crash your car, you can often drive it home or to a shop. If you damage your ‘flying car’, you can’t fly it.
Given the level of responsibility shown by many drown pilots, I totally dread the day the public is invited into the sky with their flying Buicks.
$300,000 (New)
Seats: 2
Speed: 115 mph
Useful load: 460 pounds
Payload w/full fuel (32 gal): 322 pounds
Range: 489 miles
$364,000 (New; Latest model currently available as low as $88,000, used. Older models as low as $22,640 at controller.com)
Seats: 4
Speed: 140 mph
Useful load: 759 pounds
Payload w/full fuel (56 gal): 423 pounds
Range: 801 miles
A lightplane for the masses is a non-starter. As the others have said for the reasons they gave.
But IMO never say never to something like the overgrown drone **Xema **posits. HV diagrams are applicable to helos with unitary rotor systems. Not those with 6 or 8 rotors able to controlled-crash with 20% of the rotors inop.
I agree it takes a massive increase in AI and a more open-minded approach to regulation. Both of which are plausible.
Johnny mentioned real estate. Good point. The roughly 30% of all urban real estate spent unproductively now on roads & parking lots could be repurposed into far fewer landing pads and more usable land for revenue-producing buildings.
IMO the biggest technological obstacles are the price of power and the weight & volume of power storage.
The biggest societal obstacles are simply the path dependency. I *can *imagine being in a world of few cars and lots of personal shared multi-copter uber-drones. I *can’t *imagine the societal process that gets us from here to there in much less than 500 years of incrementalism.
Forbes: a company has plans to make a flying car commercially available to the public within 24 months. That’s the AeroMobile.
There have been similar articles published at least yearly for the last 30 years or more.