I’ve heard repeatedly jokes about how “they” “promised us flying cars” and look at the traffic and my old beat up datsun routine.
Where did this flying car stuff come from – was it publicized in the 1950’s? Was there ever any ‘promise’? Some kind of rocket scientist gave a speech on the subject?
Logic would show that flying machines have no room for error and common people would have no way of maintaining such vehicles.
It was arguably the most common prediction of futurists in the 1950s and '60s of what everyday life would be like in in the late 20th or early 21st century.
It was the sort of thing that was, and still is, published in magazines like Popular Mechanics. Even if it wasn’t practical, it was part of the popular culture for many years. You still see it in many science fiction films. We’re just waiting for someone to invent an anti-gravity drive.
Are you curious solely about why flying cars were picked as the topic of discussion, or the origin of the phrase itself?
The first part is as brought up above: The subject is one that has been long treated as one of interest, and has stayed that way to the present day (Paul Moller has been recycling the same press release for forty years and still is able to get coverage, in the press and on this board, every time). There were some rather notable prototypes in the era (The Aerocar, for starters), which also helped, and the fact that predictions about them have tended to be of a “we’ll be in full production in a few years” for the last half-century has been of influence.
The actual phrase, however, is one that I have not been able to track yet.
I don’t remember what it was selling (insurance maybe?), but the specific line comes from a commercial from right around the turn of the century (20th to 21st). Avery Brooks (from Deep Space Nine) is the actor who says it in the commercial, I believe.
In the late 60’s things like the moon landing had a lot of us kids thinking we were entering a futuristic world. Life would include flying cars and living in space. Every boy I knew had a Major Matt Mason action figure (I didn’t play with freaking dolls! They were action figures!) and watched the Jetsons when they were on prime time.
I vividly recall grade school teachers telling us that in our life times there would be some sort of flying car, or personal aircraft.
So, yeah! Where the %$#@ is my flying car! 
I’ve found that line (for IBM, btw), but that’s not the original: it appeared in “Calvin and Hobbes” about a decade earlier, and I’m not sure that Bill Watterson coined the phrase.
The Jetsons, shown in 1962, are the ultimate reference compendium of the future. George Jetson had a flying car. QED.
The popular culture antecedents are harder to trace. Sure there have been attempts at grafting a car body to wings since early in the 20th century. I don’t think those were ever well-enough known to sprout the image.
My guess is that flying cars appeared on sf pulp magazine covers in the 1930s (or possibly their brethren, the popular science-style here comes the future inventions magazines, often put out by the same companies.)
Personal helicopters became the next big thing at the end of WWII. Popular Mechanics did a famous cover in 1951 of suburban households stowing tiny copters in their garages. A number of similar covers followed in various publications.
The very first Tom Swift Jr. novel from 1954 was Tom Swift and His Flying Lab, a vertical takeoff giant plastic-covered atomic-powered plane. Not strictly a car, but close.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if various comic book strips about the future (Tommy Tomorrow, e,g,) used flying cars along with their rockets. TV shows might also have had them floating at the end of visible strings.
And the print prognosticators stuck them on all their lists. It seemed an easy engineering feat and a brilliant way to get over the swelling traffic jams on the new freeways to the suburbs.
Some research on pulp covers is indicated. If anybody has a collection, or books that reprint the covers, you’d do me a favor by flipping through them to see what you can find.
Lost the edit window so just wanted to add that the cover of the December 1951 Motor Trend had a blurb, Your Flying Car is Here Today and an electric power ad from 1953 shows a mother, daughter, and family dog zipping off to market in their flying saucer.
Not exactly “flying cars” but IIRC the 1920s movie METROPOLIS has the upper classes running around in their own little planes.
Here’s a cite from 1959.
From 1957
A noble but failed attempt in 1947
Last but not least, an IBM ad from the year 2000. “I was promised flying cars!”
It may have started as far back as the 1930’s, with the introduction of the Autogyro to the United States.
From Popular Science, March, 1931:
Will Autogiro Banish Present Plane by Assen Jordanoff
Although they undoubtedly appeared earlier, flying cars also appeared on popular-science-style magazine covers as late as 1971. Here’s an example.
That would be the AVE Mizar. Small photo.
It wasn’t just kids, nor was it just magazines like Popular Mechanics. In the 1960s, Scientific American used to carry ads from major aerospace and technology vendors, which often would describe interesting space projects that were under way, in addition to the famous ones like Mercury and Gemini. There were the X-planes and Dynasoar, Hiller lifting bodies, small orbiting laboratories, and so on. Most people today are either too young to know, or have forgotten just how optimistic an era that was. One could really get the idea that an almost Buck Rogerish era of everyday spaceflight was right around the corner.
Given that, I think it highly probable that the Jetsons really gave the flying car idea wings. Hah! A little joke.
Never mind the the flying car, but I do want limitless cheap energy (another thing we were supposed to get from the atom), the Hilton Hotel in orbit, and for most of Planet Earth’s people not to be so wretchedly poor as they are. We thought there would be limitless possibilities, and what did we get?
Oil shock, terrorism, endless wars, regional religious strife, and economic recession. And, if the thread over in GD about Russia and Poland is not greatly exaggerating, looks like we’ve got the Cold War back. Just effing dandy.
I saw 2 of the Taylor Aerocars flying together in Florida about 10 years ago (Sun & Fun airshow). Looked at one of them in a museum 2 weeks ago along with all the other cool ideas that didn’t get off the ground (pun intended). Also say 2 new companies trying to make a flying car plus a motorcycle plus a powered back pack.
I think Things To Come had them as well.
Whenever someone asks about flying cars, my response is always “Cessna makes one priced to own at only 80K. Getting a license for it is a bit of a bitch though.”
Now, a flying car you can drive on a highway, that’s a bit harder to do. Sure, you can only take off and land at airports with an airplane, but then again, with cars, you can’t hardly even stray from the paved road without risk of damaging something. 
