The weight of cars (physics question)

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@Lemur866

You want to take a car and add wings and call it a flying car. Except that makes about as much sense as a sword that can also fire bullets. Yes, such things were actually made back in the black powder days…but they made no sense. If you want a sword, get a sword. If you want a pistol, get a pistol.

So if you need a VTOL passenger aircraft you can get one, but it’s going to be called a “helicopter”. And it’s going to be much more expensive than a car.

You want a safe vehicle not much more expensive than a car, that can hold 2-5 passengers, have VTOL, and still allow you to drive down to the neighborhood grocery store? Not going to happen. Impossible. You can have a (relatively) cheap airplane, you can have an expensive helicopter, but you can’t cram all that into an automobile chassis, much less cheaply and safely.

There’s a reason airplanes look like airplanes, not like cars. There’s a reason helicopters look like helicopters, not like airplanes or cars. And neither of them are cheap, neither of them are fail safe. Why would you expect a consumer VTOL airplane to be cheap and safe, when the only VTOL aircraft in the world are hideously expensive and horribly dangerous?

I was mostly joking. I know it’s not practical yet. Impossible is a very big word.

What I’m talking about is neither a helicopter or airplane. We were told we’d have a flying car by 1967: http://media.popularmechanics.com/images/195707-sm.jpg