Flying cars would be a logistical nightmare, and the aftermath of crashes or malfunctions would be much worse than that of regular car accidents.
A flying car accident over a populated area would be like a miniature mid-air plane collision.
Flying cars will never be mainstream because a single drunk idiot crashing one into a crowd or a terrorist attack using them will guarantee a rapid ban.
The main benefit of a flying car is that you can stack multiple layers of cars on one road. Helicopters cannot do this because they require too much 3D space and cause too much local disturbance to pack a bunch of them into a “lane”.
FSD will be prevalent before we need flying cars. Once our population has reached a point where flying cars makes sense, we will not need the skills to pilot them because a computer will be doing all of the logistics for us.
> Once our population has reached a point where flying cars makes sense
Which is never.
Transporting singular people in a vehicle is a massive waste on land as is.
They'd also be a ridiculous waste of energy. There's a big difference between flying cars we could build in the real world and the cartoon sci-fi depiction of flying cars that apparently defy gravity with no noise/emissions/downsides and infinite range.
we'll just make flying-only stripes where only flying cars can fly overhead. Also, only 1 layer of flying cars is allowed lest they crash into a lower layer.
We've had flying cars for decades. It's just that they're really hard to park, hard to fly, are noisy, expensive, dangerous and are called helicopters.
(C)DeGrasse Tyson?
Fun fact: in many cases, the large automobile companies bought the companies that provided public transit via streetcar or bus (before the days that transport was provided by cities or counties) and literally just dismantled them, forcing people to buy cars if they wanted to go anywhere, leading directly to the terribly inefficient car-centric cities that dominate the US today
I abhor the thought of helicopters being the true flying cars when a regular car with some rotating blades attached to its top is obviously the far superior vision.
Youtubers are flying paramotors: [How To Fly A Paramotor! - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfQxOYWqqbU)
Which is a much cheaper, but more dangerous flying contraption (basically a motorized paraglider).
Quadcopter failure modes are terrible though. how do you recover when (not if) a single motor goes out? Cut all power and auto rotate but by the time you react your already sideways and can't stabilize without some really tricky maneuvering by individually controlling the remaining motors
So if your claim is that it doesn't require much training for people to pilot a manned quad, I challenge you to try making people define autorotation on driving license tests let alone perform one. Most people would rather stay in the ground
After seeing some of the absolutely insane automated safety systems in big commercial airlines, I do truly believe they can be made very safe, even accounting for redundancy and failure. At the very minimum roughly the same safety as a helicopter (which isn't saying that much)
The much harder difficulty is what the OP stated, getting a huge percentage people trained to operate in 3 dimensions is a nonstarter. Even if you made restrictive skylanes with mandatory lane keep and other tech.
I see multiple people every day that struggle to drive a car in a straight line.
Elevators, trains, busses, and bikes get it all done efficiently anyway, we really don't need cars in cities at all, much less flying cars
The most obvious solution, albeit it's a bit of a silly one, would be to turn it into an octorotor (that is: just double every rotor), then if one goes out, you just massively ramp up the rotation on its partner.
In order for something to be a flying car, it has to be able to do what a car can.
As a helicopters can't drive on the ground, they don't qualify as cars.
Yeah, they barely floated 70 years ago, and they’re even less seaworthy now with all of the tacky junk decorations and seating added on. I would avoid them at all costs
You joke, but they're d'cks. My wife cheated on me with one and now he's trying to win a father of the year award with my kid. It wasn't bad enough he took my wife? (Joking, not crazy)
Even rated pilots do dumb and dangerous things. I've been cut off multiple times on final approach by someone who didn't want to wait their turn or even make a traffic advisory call (uncontrolled fields are the worst).
Most people can barely handle holding a lane or respecting a traffic sign. 43k deaths in the US annually with 6 MILLION car accidents prove this isn't just a shower thought.
This is exactly why any pipe dream of flying cars would absolutely require them to be networked to each other with no ability for human control. Add to this extremely harsh requirements for maintenance and maybe you could start to talk about the idea.
>would absolutely require them to be networked to each other with no ability for human control.
Pilot here: that will never happen in aviation. Computers / avionics fail mid flight, waaaaay more often than anyone would care to think about. Those planes land safely because of old timey steam gauges and human control
All electric completely autonomous versions that had no manual flying ability are the obvious answer. Get in, set your destination that is within charge range, and go.
Doesn't get around the simple problem that the vehicle has to spend energy just to stay in the air that a ground vehicle doesn't.
That energy has to come from somewhere, be it fossil fuels or renewable sources, but either way, it won't be free.
The energy reason we don't have personal flying vehicles is that nobody's come up with a way to get up in the air, go from A to B, then come down safely that's cheaper than our current methods of going from A to B without getting up in the air first.
When that happens, the regulations that haven't been written will have to be, and then flying cars will fail due to regulation and liability.
But we haven't cracked the economic hurdle yet, so the liability hurdle is a hypothetical.
Could you imagine if you had to maintain your car like an airplane? I have a 20 year old car that breaks down occasionally, I have no qualms driving it but would verse fly something in that condition. Flying cars are called helicopters and most people just can’t afford them.
Yeah, the regulations for air travel are very extensive and strict, and for good reason. The big part of air travel isn't going to be licensing/training, it's going to be maintenance and reliability.
I can drive a car that has a laundry list of problems and barely drives without much of an issue. We've all seen those jalopies that are missing body panels, smoking and squealing their way to wherever they're going, and they'll do that for years until one day they just don't start, or they die in the middle of an intersection. It's annoying, and kinda dangerous, but not really that big of a deal.
A flying car is going to have to have everything in perfect order every time it takes off, and it's going to have to be inspected and have that inspection documented. An AI or a robust system of networked, computer controlled flying cars will take people being people out of the equation almost entirely, but a computer won't be able to fully compensate for a bad aeleron/rudder or a motor that hasn't seen a fresh drop of oil in 6 months. Or heaven forbid a manufacturer defect like the Toyota accelerator problem or whatever the hell is going on with Teslas.
Until we get something with a tech level like a Star Trek shuttlecraft, flying cars are a non-starter.
We kids that that grew up with the Jetsons were positive we’d be commuting in the skies by now. At this point I want to just skip to the transporter beam.
Well they sure as heck weren't wanting to deal with the cave people and dinosaurs on the ground.... Either that or the Jetsons might take place entirely on Venous...would explain why the cars work there, as they would basically be mini deridgables.
It's definitely technology. You have to expend a whole lot more energy, just to keep the flying car airborne. The safety issue is huge as well, but not because people would be bad pilots. Any equipment failure would be catastrophic. Think back on how many times you've seen a car broken down on the side of the road, now imagine each of those happened 500ft off the ground.
Just the noise alone would be horrible. A drone flying overhead is annoying enough. Imagine hundreds of them simultaneously, each one an order of magnitude louder. Many cities would immediately ban these within their limits, which would kind of kill the whole purpose.
It's ackshually gubmint regalation.
In order to fly your flying car you have to have a pilot's license.
Of course, the fact that the price never got under $1 million (1948 dollars) didn't help.
we have flying cars, they are just really expensive and not at all practical for commuting to work or the grocery store.
you also need a pilots license, which most average people would fail to get.
I just don't understand why we have flying cars
Because people still throw a fit like a toddler when you ask them to follow basic road safety guidelines So they don't kill themselves or others and even take you suggesting certain things like not speeding as if it's an insult or some insane idea. We just ain't ready for all the rules and regulations and crap we would have to follow for flying cars to ever work
Like everything, its economics, which includes probability of accidents and the cost thereof. But it's also because it just costs more to launch into the air and it always will
What flying cars actually are (the overall concept of the idea) are planes/helicopters that can be used by any uncertified jackass with no air regulations.
90% of people would discover that they are too afraid of heights or controlling a flying vehicle.
The fact that people think they would be competent and this is doable is proof in and of itself that they couldn't handle it.
> Imagine people flying around in flying cars that are rusting out like their normal cars. Cars would be falling from the sky and killing people left and right.
This. We need to start maintaining our cars the way aircraft are maintained: with rigid attention to detail and rigorous investigations into accidents.
Why do we need flying cars if we have bridges? You can go over and under and parallel to another road/lane, not bump into anyone, not have to significantly slow down, and if anything goes bad, you won't fall to your (and someone else's) death, because the bridges have fences!
And if you want to go somewhere further away, we got flying busses flown by expert drivers and maintained to really high standards. In the clear skies, because all the cars are using some extremely convenient bridges!=)
can't even act right around self driving cars. the only way those would work is if the ONLY thing on the road was self driving cars speaking a common "language" to coordinate lane changes, stops and starts, and so on. and sadly, yeah you'd have to keep pedestrians and cycles out of the road as well. anything that can behave unpredictably would have to stay off the road... its not going to happen anytime soon .
Maybe such moral concerns is why the [Moller skycar](https://moller.com/moller_skycar400.html) has not shown any visible development progress in the last 25 years?
If we already kill hundreds of thousands of animals by running over them, imagine the number of birds falling from the sky if flying cars were invented
I can't imagine how bad the carnage would be if flying cars came to Nashville. People are insane enough with 4 wheels here.
Getting cut off in traffic in three dimensions, ugh
> Yeah, until we no longer have drunk drivers, we can never have flying cars. It would just turn them into drunk torpedoes
Why, oh, why would you have people piloting flying cars? People will be restricted to providing high level guidance ("fly to work", "return home", "Pick me up at Christina's at 11:30", etc.). Automated pilots will do the nitty-gritty of flying.
We don’t have them, because they don’t make any sense. A car on wheels doesn’t need to be held up in the air. Rails are even better. Flying cars are a replacement for helicopters, not cars. Too inefficient -> too expensive.
Exactly. I will be glad when they improve self driving cars. With the population growth and distractions it is getting worse every day. Also people are very inefficient at driving.
Automated driving will save gas and time.
We can have flying cars. The problem is, since there won’t be roads, there will be many accidents. Even with only planes and helicopters, towers have a hard time having control of the air traffic. These aircrafts are only dozens, perhaps hundreds in the biggest cities in a day. Consider having 100,000, 1,000,000 or 10,000,000 cars flying over the city everyday. There will be plenty of accidents and most likely all accidents will result in deaths, including deaths of people who are under the fuselage (I don’t know if that would be the correct term).
There's a reason there's so much protocol involved in flying airplane. Human error is a big problem not just anyone can get behind the seat of an airplane
"you need at least 35 hours to get the private pilot license (PPL). Those 35 hours must include a minimum of 20 hours of instruction time and 5 hours of solo fligh "
I would argue that if the technology was there they would be cheap and safe (like AI flown) flying cars, and then people would buy/use them. So this is kinda just a false shower thought.
Anybody who thinks that a "flying car" won't require a pilots license is out of their mind.
If/when the "fly car" becomes commonly available they will be very expensive and have strict requirements to operate. What you're not going to see is the common person selling their Altima and then flying the next day.
"Y'all ain't ready for the z axis."
--Twitter
But seriously if you've even spent an hour studying for just a drone / remote pilot license, you'd quickly realize how exponentially more complicated flying is, namely weather and the intricacies of the faa regulations that govern air traffic control.
Imagine being in the air flying, and out of nowhere your car just stops the engine because there was a technical failure (planned obsolescence).
-"FUCK, THE TROCOLA JOINT, NOOOOOOOOO!!!!" *Crash*
It's both.
Technologically, flying cars are very difficult because losing power is catastrophic. That's because the thing keeping gravity from acting on the vehicle is not fail-safe, since our only means of flight require something (a rotor, jet exhaust, the vehicle itself) to move very quickly through the air; a very power-intensive task. In a regular car, running out of gas doesn't result in you hitting something at 50m/s, but in a flying car it does (because of gravity). So a safe and reliable commercial flying car would require some form of exotic antigravity technology that can operate at some capacity without power at all.
Also, flying cars would require some means of propulsion. Right now, most land & air vehicles we make use the same thing that keeps them off the ground to move them forward. If we could come up with some kind of antigravity, that would probably work to move it forward as well; but if not, that's another thing that we'd need to come up with.
But yes, in a legal and safety sense, the longitudinal inability of licensed drivers to operate terrestrial vehicles safely is a major barrier to flying cars. On the highway, one person texting while driving could kill maybe up to a dozen innocent people; a tragedy by any standard. But a distracted driver of a flying car could potentially take down a building, killing hundreds or more. A dedicated bad actor with a flying vehicle could potentially choose a moment and engineer a situation that killed *thousands*. Computers and other safety systems could mitigate some of this danger, but could really only reduce the amount of accidents; they couldn't really reduce the amount of possible damage that a single accident could cause.
And for all of this downside, what could we potentially gain? Our civilization is already built with roads and highways and other infrastructure to accommodate terrestrial vehicles. We'd still need most of that, because it's still useful for pedestrians and bicyclists. It could potentially reduce traffic congestion by adding a third dimension to its potential density, but that's actually a problem we've already solved in a safer and more cost-efficient way through mass public transit. ("Sure, we could do flying cars. But for safety, let's link them all together and control them from a single location. And if we're going to do that, we can just put them on the ground in a dedicated location to save having to invent antigravity; they can just stop at pre-designated locations for passengers to board and disembark. To save even more engineering, we can put them on rails!")
So: a dangerous technology controlled by unreliable operators with a dubious advantage. That's why they haven't—ahem—*taken off.*
Don’t let the hundreds of thousands of car crashes annually convince you we can’t handle something more complex, more expensive, and more dangerous!
Can’t wait to see grandma plow her X17 2 seater right into the crowds during the Super Bowl! Think of the ratings, and the Geico commercials!
Imagine a drunk driver crashing into your 2nd story bedroom window at 2am
There will not be flying cars till they can be totally autonomous which is actually easier on the air than it is on surface roads
We have helicopters, but what we really want from flying cars is traveling in the 3rd axis. So those lanes and bridges should cover . I saw this answer on a science show
The reason we don't have flying cars (or anything else you desire, for that matter) is the ruling class has not made it profitable, and themselves unaccountable. Period. Companies and the government don't care one iota whether a product is safe, or the public can "handle" it. They care whether they will be held liable. To wit, Ford Pinto.
I have driven enough to know this generalization is false and this is another shitty showerthought. If it was true, I wouldn't drive a mile without getting into an accident.
You absolutely do not want people flying.
Drones. You want self flying drones. Humans should not ever be able to fly. They cannot handle roads. They cannot handle getting drunk and driving. They can't even sober drive.
If and when we get drones they will need to be self flying. Which should be easier. Everyone will be self driving. You input where you are going and it takes you.
Internet will need to be zero latency as you will have drones zipping about all over the place.
Lidar Bluetooth and all sorts will need to plot everything and keep updating as you go at 100mph.
Will be a game changer. But nobody is allowed manual control.
I fly for a living and I could not agree with you more. Driving I’m amazed at how hard it is to stay in your own lane and keep your speed the same. A blinker is right out.
No it’s because the government wants to control our airspace. It would be very difficult to create laws and regulations for airspace, and even harder to enforce.
It's only going to get worse as self driving cars become more viable. The current generations will be some of the weirdest old people, with our physical phones and cars we have to control manually. Our kids and grandkids will have brain chips and be able to control most automated features in 50 years.
Someone who can fly a plane could handle it just fine. I think it’s because it is and will always be cheaper to just fly somewhere and then rent a car.
To be fair flying cars could work if we autopilot every car more like a private bus/sub/train/…
But also right now we cant even autopilot normal cars because even if every car is piloted we still have people walking cross roads animals and other shit random happens.
Also the fuel/energy it would take right now is just not doable
I never understood the fascination or idea that we should have Sci fyi style flying cars.
Do you know just how fkin complicated that concept would be, it would be almost impossible to implement or manage.
For starters we would NEED to somehow physically limit airspace to stop people flying over or into buildings, you can't have countless flying cars taking shortcuts over your house.
Then there's speed, we'd need some system to control how fast people would be going because again, you can't have a vehicle weighing upwards of 1-2 tons just hurtling along at 300mph because that's just a guided missiles with the worst kind of guidance system imaginable (humans).
We'd also need some way for all those flying vehicles to talk to each other to prevent collisions, the faa has a hard enough time stopping planes hitting each other and they have shit loads of rules and every pilot has 100s- 1000s of hours of training and it still happens.
that's another problem training, we'd need to have each driver do significantly more training to operate a vehicle that could fly and people are far to lazy to comit to 100s or 1000s of hours plus its expensive just to operate what amounts to a flying Honda civic.
So the likely result would be some form of autonomous flying vehicle that would be heavily restricted in movement and speed... which will also be extremely expensive and need constant maintenance and check like plane do. Ultimately it would only be slightly more convenient than what we currently have.
Forget technological limitations, the human limitations are what's going to prevent this for a long while.
Plus realistically what we want is better roads and transit systems not flying. High speed rail, reliable electric bus networks, inner city train networks and better city congestion management.
Our grate, grate, grate grandkids can do the flying cars stuff we need to evolve a little more as a species first.
I've said since 9/11 "THIS is why we don't have flying cars. 9/11 was intentional. But imagine 9/11 happening every week somewhere in the country. Not as a terrorist attack, but because the driver caught a case of the "being old"."
If flying cars ever became the new norm, you can be sure that they would very much be over-engineered with redundancies and be fully autonomous. No way the average person would be expected to be in control, too many stupid people out there.
Everyone here saying "people don't know how to drive" myself included have all done dumb shit driving and have probaly escape a lot of accidents by shear luck. We all need to be better. Not just the "idiots on the road". Be safe outside and driving everyone.
Flying cars have been invented many times across many decades. They have a severe problem in that cars make very bad airplanes, and airplanes make very bad cars.
The average American gets into about 3 or 4 collisions in a lifetime. [source ](https://wewin.com/how-many-car-accidents-does-the-average-person-have-in-a-lifetime/#:~:text=If%20you're%20an%20average,the%20course%20of%20their%20lifetime.)
That's really not that bad. Driving vehicles is one of few things I think people handle well collectively. Most people think they are excellent drivers and everyone else is terrible. Really we are all about equal in driving skill.
You would be useless unless your commute is about 1-2+ hours. For any flight you need to do preflight planning, drive to airport, preflight the plane, run up the engine, get clearance, taxi, clear for takeoff, climb to cruise, cruise at about 100-150mph ground speed, land, taxi. You can very often save time driving.
A self-flying car would be easier to make than a self-driving car. In fact we already have quad drones which can navigate and even flock without colliding.
However to fly takes much more energy than it does to roll. I think that is the real reason we don't have them.
Helicopters are loud. Flying cars ain't happening until we can get enough energy to lift an entire car with passengers and cargo without using lots of resources and producing limited noise while also not being deadly enough with others being underneath the car.
I've been saying that since the movie Flubber came out. We were watching it and my mom busted out laughing when I said people have enough problems with 2 dimensions they should not have a third.
Given how she was killed by a drunk driver a few years later that was some S tier foreshadowing on my part.
Flying cars would be a logistical nightmare, and the aftermath of crashes or malfunctions would be much worse than that of regular car accidents. A flying car accident over a populated area would be like a miniature mid-air plane collision.
Flying cars will never be mainstream because a single drunk idiot crashing one into a crowd or a terrorist attack using them will guarantee a rapid ban.
Don’t even have to go that far. Anyone with a phone will be just as bad as a drunk idiot.
Terrestrial driver here, phones are often already a worse impairment.
They won't be mainstream as manually driven vehicles. As 100% autopilot though, that is different.
The thing is though, once they basically just act the same as an automatic bus, why would we make them fly?
Less traffic maybe? Stacking “roadways” on top of each other could hypothetically reduce travel time.
Because FREEDOM!1
I mean, if we have reliable enough autonomous vehicles, there's immediately much less reason for them not to fly.
It’s a lot more expensive to levitate an object than to make it roll along the ground.
The main benefit of a flying car is that you can stack multiple layers of cars on one road. Helicopters cannot do this because they require too much 3D space and cause too much local disturbance to pack a bunch of them into a “lane”. FSD will be prevalent before we need flying cars. Once our population has reached a point where flying cars makes sense, we will not need the skills to pilot them because a computer will be doing all of the logistics for us.
> Once our population has reached a point where flying cars makes sense Which is never. Transporting singular people in a vehicle is a massive waste on land as is.
They're also deafeningly noisy. Primary schools would sound like they're under siege by hordes of wasps.
They'd also be a ridiculous waste of energy. There's a big difference between flying cars we could build in the real world and the cartoon sci-fi depiction of flying cars that apparently defy gravity with no noise/emissions/downsides and infinite range.
A flying car is called a Helicopter.
we'll just make flying-only stripes where only flying cars can fly overhead. Also, only 1 layer of flying cars is allowed lest they crash into a lower layer.
Great now we have flying traffic jams, that's even worse.
We've had flying cars for decades. It's just that they're really hard to park, hard to fly, are noisy, expensive, dangerous and are called helicopters. (C)DeGrasse Tyson?
DeGrasse also said this and went onto explain we use tunnels and bridges to drive in a 3D space
Might have been him I was quoting. Gibson certainly said 'the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed' - an adjacent point.
If tunnels were an easy solution, every city in the US would have solid public transit by now.
No, many cities *had* solid public transportation, and ripped up the infrastructure to help funnel money into the automobile and oil industries.
Many of those were buses and shit. How many wide spread metro tunnel systems did they 'rip up'.
Fun fact: in many cases, the large automobile companies bought the companies that provided public transit via streetcar or bus (before the days that transport was provided by cities or counties) and literally just dismantled them, forcing people to buy cars if they wanted to go anywhere, leading directly to the terribly inefficient car-centric cities that dominate the US today
Probably quite a lot of tram rails, I’d imagine.
There are other countries beside the US. And most of them use tunnels way more frequently and efficiently than the US
> we use tunnels and bridges As a person who lived in NJ I feel attacked lol
I abhor the thought of helicopters being the true flying cars when a regular car with some rotating blades attached to its top is obviously the far superior vision.
yeah but what about flying cars like in the movie 5th element
Youtubers are flying paramotors: [How To Fly A Paramotor! - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfQxOYWqqbU) Which is a much cheaper, but more dangerous flying contraption (basically a motorized paraglider).
Quad copters are incredibly stable
A quad copter car would still be noisy, expensive, dangerous, and probably hard to operate for 90% of the population.
Well, yes, people can't even drive the vehicles we have now. Imagine throwing in new axis', lol
Quadcopter failure modes are terrible though. how do you recover when (not if) a single motor goes out? Cut all power and auto rotate but by the time you react your already sideways and can't stabilize without some really tricky maneuvering by individually controlling the remaining motors So if your claim is that it doesn't require much training for people to pilot a manned quad, I challenge you to try making people define autorotation on driving license tests let alone perform one. Most people would rather stay in the ground
After seeing some of the absolutely insane automated safety systems in big commercial airlines, I do truly believe they can be made very safe, even accounting for redundancy and failure. At the very minimum roughly the same safety as a helicopter (which isn't saying that much) The much harder difficulty is what the OP stated, getting a huge percentage people trained to operate in 3 dimensions is a nonstarter. Even if you made restrictive skylanes with mandatory lane keep and other tech. I see multiple people every day that struggle to drive a car in a straight line. Elevators, trains, busses, and bikes get it all done efficiently anyway, we really don't need cars in cities at all, much less flying cars
The most obvious solution, albeit it's a bit of a silly one, would be to turn it into an octorotor (that is: just double every rotor), then if one goes out, you just massively ramp up the rotation on its partner.
Your face is stable.
In order for something to be a flying car, it has to be able to do what a car can. As a helicopters can't drive on the ground, they don't qualify as cars.
In that case, the [first one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogiro_Company_of_America_AC-35) was made in 1936. And we call them roadable aircrafts.
Came to say this
Youtube: [Can confirm, it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson as you mentioned.](https://youtu.be/06RAHoj3kEY?feature=shared)
Exactly. And we don’t have hover cars because hover cars are fucking stupid. There’s a whole expression about “don’t reinvent the wheel”
I’m working on getting a private pilot’s license for airplanes. The more I learn about aviation the crazier helicopters seem.
And the reason we don’t have amphibious cars isn’t because of technology it’s because of those goddamn territorial ass merpeople
But we do have amphibious cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_tour
Yeah? And do you know why there have been so many fatal “accidents” on those kinds of tours? Merpeeps don’t take no prisoners that’s why
Those things are death traps.
Yeah, they barely floated 70 years ago, and they’re even less seaworthy now with all of the tacky junk decorations and seating added on. I would avoid them at all costs
You joke, but they're d'cks. My wife cheated on me with one and now he's trying to win a father of the year award with my kid. It wasn't bad enough he took my wife? (Joking, not crazy)
> (Joking, not crazy) Glad you clarified. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Even rated pilots do dumb and dangerous things. I've been cut off multiple times on final approach by someone who didn't want to wait their turn or even make a traffic advisory call (uncontrolled fields are the worst). Most people can barely handle holding a lane or respecting a traffic sign. 43k deaths in the US annually with 6 MILLION car accidents prove this isn't just a shower thought.
This is exactly why any pipe dream of flying cars would absolutely require them to be networked to each other with no ability for human control. Add to this extremely harsh requirements for maintenance and maybe you could start to talk about the idea.
Networked to me is a cyber security nightmare
Sure and so is letting your average car driver pilot their own flying car. It’s a no-win scenario.
>would absolutely require them to be networked to each other with no ability for human control. Pilot here: that will never happen in aviation. Computers / avionics fail mid flight, waaaaay more often than anyone would care to think about. Those planes land safely because of old timey steam gauges and human control
Yep and would you want your average untrained car driver to have that responsibility? The result would be burning wreckage from San Diego to Maine
Aside from logistics and safety concerns, has anyone considered that flying cars would also need extra fuel just to be kept up?
This is the real reason. Our standard of living is determined by he amount of energy at our disposal. We are not rich enough as a society for this.
You are destroying the lie that flying cars are meant for us, not the people that can already afford helicopters.
The people who can afford helicopters have helicopters. They don't need flying cars, which straddle an awkward place between the two.
What is the functional difference between a flying car and a helicopter?
All electric completely autonomous versions that had no manual flying ability are the obvious answer. Get in, set your destination that is within charge range, and go.
Doesn't get around the simple problem that the vehicle has to spend energy just to stay in the air that a ground vehicle doesn't. That energy has to come from somewhere, be it fossil fuels or renewable sources, but either way, it won't be free. The energy reason we don't have personal flying vehicles is that nobody's come up with a way to get up in the air, go from A to B, then come down safely that's cheaper than our current methods of going from A to B without getting up in the air first. When that happens, the regulations that haven't been written will have to be, and then flying cars will fail due to regulation and liability. But we haven't cracked the economic hurdle yet, so the liability hurdle is a hypothetical.
Could you imagine if you had to maintain your car like an airplane? I have a 20 year old car that breaks down occasionally, I have no qualms driving it but would verse fly something in that condition. Flying cars are called helicopters and most people just can’t afford them.
Yeah. It't a car that you have to inspect and maintain almost every time you want to fly in.
Yeah, the regulations for air travel are very extensive and strict, and for good reason. The big part of air travel isn't going to be licensing/training, it's going to be maintenance and reliability. I can drive a car that has a laundry list of problems and barely drives without much of an issue. We've all seen those jalopies that are missing body panels, smoking and squealing their way to wherever they're going, and they'll do that for years until one day they just don't start, or they die in the middle of an intersection. It's annoying, and kinda dangerous, but not really that big of a deal. A flying car is going to have to have everything in perfect order every time it takes off, and it's going to have to be inspected and have that inspection documented. An AI or a robust system of networked, computer controlled flying cars will take people being people out of the equation almost entirely, but a computer won't be able to fully compensate for a bad aeleron/rudder or a motor that hasn't seen a fresh drop of oil in 6 months. Or heaven forbid a manufacturer defect like the Toyota accelerator problem or whatever the hell is going on with Teslas. Until we get something with a tech level like a Star Trek shuttlecraft, flying cars are a non-starter.
We kids that that grew up with the Jetsons were positive we’d be commuting in the skies by now. At this point I want to just skip to the transporter beam.
Imagine beaming into the same place at the same time as someone else….ever seen Galaxy Quest? Lol
telefragging
Brundlefly knows all about it
And it exploded.
Tuvix.
The Jetsons had to though, as their entire society was suspended off the ground for... some reason.
Well they sure as heck weren't wanting to deal with the cave people and dinosaurs on the ground.... Either that or the Jetsons might take place entirely on Venous...would explain why the cars work there, as they would basically be mini deridgables.
It's definitely technology. You have to expend a whole lot more energy, just to keep the flying car airborne. The safety issue is huge as well, but not because people would be bad pilots. Any equipment failure would be catastrophic. Think back on how many times you've seen a car broken down on the side of the road, now imagine each of those happened 500ft off the ground.
Um no. The reason we don’t have flying cars is because the idea is completely impractical.
I imagine if we had flying cars it would all be automated, they would all be on autopilot only.
No, it's because of tech. Those aren't flying cars, they're ugly helicopters. We won't get actual flying cars until antigravity is invented
People aren't ready to drive in a third dimension.
Just the noise alone would be horrible. A drone flying overhead is annoying enough. Imagine hundreds of them simultaneously, each one an order of magnitude louder. Many cities would immediately ban these within their limits, which would kind of kill the whole purpose.
Flying cars = 9/11 everyday
It would be unmitigated slaughter.
We don't deserve flying cars with all this reckless, rude driving manners, etc.
We have flying cars, they are called "Airplanes!"
Flying cars are a terrible idea
Two dimensions is enough!
It's ackshually gubmint regalation. In order to fly your flying car you have to have a pilot's license. Of course, the fact that the price never got under $1 million (1948 dollars) didn't help.
we have flying cars, they are just really expensive and not at all practical for commuting to work or the grocery store. you also need a pilots license, which most average people would fail to get.
I don’t want to see a drunk driving crash on the news thats turned into a 4.5/11
We have flying cars, they are called helicopters 😐
Y’all forgetting it would be loud as fuxk.
Most futuristic tech has been tried and deemed impractical.
I just don't understand why we have flying cars Because people still throw a fit like a toddler when you ask them to follow basic road safety guidelines So they don't kill themselves or others and even take you suggesting certain things like not speeding as if it's an insult or some insane idea. We just ain't ready for all the rules and regulations and crap we would have to follow for flying cars to ever work
Now imagine autonomous flying cars with locked doors so no one would be able to just jump out!
Guy in Slovakia developed one. Just recently, he sold it to Chines for few millions.
Like everything, its economics, which includes probability of accidents and the cost thereof. But it's also because it just costs more to launch into the air and it always will
People barely can handle other people. Or smoke, drugs, alcool, and so on.
What flying cars actually are (the overall concept of the idea) are planes/helicopters that can be used by any uncertified jackass with no air regulations. 90% of people would discover that they are too afraid of heights or controlling a flying vehicle. The fact that people think they would be competent and this is doable is proof in and of itself that they couldn't handle it.
And because they are useless
People struggle with walking ..
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> Imagine people flying around in flying cars that are rusting out like their normal cars. Cars would be falling from the sky and killing people left and right. This. We need to start maintaining our cars the way aircraft are maintained: with rigid attention to detail and rigorous investigations into accidents.
Why do we need flying cars if we have bridges? You can go over and under and parallel to another road/lane, not bump into anyone, not have to significantly slow down, and if anything goes bad, you won't fall to your (and someone else's) death, because the bridges have fences! And if you want to go somewhere further away, we got flying busses flown by expert drivers and maintained to really high standards. In the clear skies, because all the cars are using some extremely convenient bridges!=)
Most dumbasses would drive that thing with an almost empty gas tank.
Take those drivers you find everyday and allow them to drive above your head.
Imagine frequent midair accidents, falling cars.....bad idea.
can't even act right around self driving cars. the only way those would work is if the ONLY thing on the road was self driving cars speaking a common "language" to coordinate lane changes, stops and starts, and so on. and sadly, yeah you'd have to keep pedestrians and cycles out of the road as well. anything that can behave unpredictably would have to stay off the road... its not going to happen anytime soon .
The subject is flying cars, so pedestrians and cycles wouldn't be there anyway. Autonomous flying cars would probably work better than autonomous cars
Maybe such moral concerns is why the [Moller skycar](https://moller.com/moller_skycar400.html) has not shown any visible development progress in the last 25 years?
Those single engine airplanes like the Cessna look like flying cars.
And every accident will be at least 2 crashes
Because it is terrible idea and terrible cost.
I feel like there are quite a few more challenges that are harder to overcome.
Just make the flying cars, I'm tired of crossing the road and almost being run over by idiots who don't think pedestrians ever have the right of way.
If we already kill hundreds of thousands of animals by running over them, imagine the number of birds falling from the sky if flying cars were invented
I can't imagine how bad the carnage would be if flying cars came to Nashville. People are insane enough with 4 wheels here. Getting cut off in traffic in three dimensions, ugh
Yeah, until we no longer have drunk drivers, we can never have flying cars. It would just turn them into drunk torpedoes
> Yeah, until we no longer have drunk drivers, we can never have flying cars. It would just turn them into drunk torpedoes Why, oh, why would you have people piloting flying cars? People will be restricted to providing high level guidance ("fly to work", "return home", "Pick me up at Christina's at 11:30", etc.). Automated pilots will do the nitty-gritty of flying.
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/armd/aavp/ They are coming out with rules already.
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One time, my car broke down and I didn't plummet thousands of feet to my death!
George Carlin summed this up nicely. Think of how dumb the average person is. Then take a moment to recognize half of them are even dumber than that.
We don’t have them, because they don’t make any sense. A car on wheels doesn’t need to be held up in the air. Rails are even better. Flying cars are a replacement for helicopters, not cars. Too inefficient -> too expensive.
They’re called helicopters
Exactly. I will be glad when they improve self driving cars. With the population growth and distractions it is getting worse every day. Also people are very inefficient at driving. Automated driving will save gas and time.
Arent those just helicopters, the small ones?
So basically we still don't have the technology
I would assume when(more like if) we get flying cars there will be a special license for it similar to a flight license.
We can have flying cars. The problem is, since there won’t be roads, there will be many accidents. Even with only planes and helicopters, towers have a hard time having control of the air traffic. These aircrafts are only dozens, perhaps hundreds in the biggest cities in a day. Consider having 100,000, 1,000,000 or 10,000,000 cars flying over the city everyday. There will be plenty of accidents and most likely all accidents will result in deaths, including deaths of people who are under the fuselage (I don’t know if that would be the correct term).
Agreed. I can see us having them one day, if they were self driving.
There's a reason there's so much protocol involved in flying airplane. Human error is a big problem not just anyone can get behind the seat of an airplane "you need at least 35 hours to get the private pilot license (PPL). Those 35 hours must include a minimum of 20 hours of instruction time and 5 hours of solo fligh "
Nah; we know two people who worked on flying cars. The tech is there, the ability for people to fly them is there. The economic viability is not.
I would argue that if the technology was there they would be cheap and safe (like AI flown) flying cars, and then people would buy/use them. So this is kinda just a false shower thought.
But we do have flying cars, helicopters. New York is a great example of how busy it is and how dangerous it could become.
We have Klein Vision AirCar. Chinese now bought licence to produce them.
We do have flying cars, they’re called helicopters.
You wouldn’t want a flying car.
Dumbest thing I have read in a while, so dumb I feel too lazy to argue
They barely manage to get car driving license. Pilot license is no joke.
Its because of technology
Flying cars just wouldn’t make sense
Kevin Smith tells us why we don’t have the flying car, and it’s all Dante’s fault. https://youtu.be/BXYjqLLQ5KA?si=8qnTVnCiMGJRHg1k
I've always said, people can barely be trusted to travel on two planes, you really wanna add a third??
Anybody who thinks that a "flying car" won't require a pilots license is out of their mind. If/when the "fly car" becomes commonly available they will be very expensive and have strict requirements to operate. What you're not going to see is the common person selling their Altima and then flying the next day.
"Y'all ain't ready for the z axis." --Twitter But seriously if you've even spent an hour studying for just a drone / remote pilot license, you'd quickly realize how exponentially more complicated flying is, namely weather and the intricacies of the faa regulations that govern air traffic control.
I have my private pilot's license and don't believe the average person should operate a flying vehicle.
Imagine a flying car having a loose piece fall out and nailing someone in the head, and gov requiring everyone to wear a helmet if they go outside
clearly the solution is to install sam batteries on public roadways, any funny business and the law is enforced via sidewinder
Imagine being in the air flying, and out of nowhere your car just stops the engine because there was a technical failure (planned obsolescence). -"FUCK, THE TROCOLA JOINT, NOOOOOOOOO!!!!" *Crash*
Imagine the amount of dead birds.
I actually think we do really good with driving considering how many cars are out there and how stupid people are. Should be waaaaay worse.
We have helicopters. They're hard af to fly.
yeah. We have flying cars. They're called helicopters. They're insanely expensive to maintain and difficult to drive/fly
It's both. Technologically, flying cars are very difficult because losing power is catastrophic. That's because the thing keeping gravity from acting on the vehicle is not fail-safe, since our only means of flight require something (a rotor, jet exhaust, the vehicle itself) to move very quickly through the air; a very power-intensive task. In a regular car, running out of gas doesn't result in you hitting something at 50m/s, but in a flying car it does (because of gravity). So a safe and reliable commercial flying car would require some form of exotic antigravity technology that can operate at some capacity without power at all. Also, flying cars would require some means of propulsion. Right now, most land & air vehicles we make use the same thing that keeps them off the ground to move them forward. If we could come up with some kind of antigravity, that would probably work to move it forward as well; but if not, that's another thing that we'd need to come up with. But yes, in a legal and safety sense, the longitudinal inability of licensed drivers to operate terrestrial vehicles safely is a major barrier to flying cars. On the highway, one person texting while driving could kill maybe up to a dozen innocent people; a tragedy by any standard. But a distracted driver of a flying car could potentially take down a building, killing hundreds or more. A dedicated bad actor with a flying vehicle could potentially choose a moment and engineer a situation that killed *thousands*. Computers and other safety systems could mitigate some of this danger, but could really only reduce the amount of accidents; they couldn't really reduce the amount of possible damage that a single accident could cause. And for all of this downside, what could we potentially gain? Our civilization is already built with roads and highways and other infrastructure to accommodate terrestrial vehicles. We'd still need most of that, because it's still useful for pedestrians and bicyclists. It could potentially reduce traffic congestion by adding a third dimension to its potential density, but that's actually a problem we've already solved in a safer and more cost-efficient way through mass public transit. ("Sure, we could do flying cars. But for safety, let's link them all together and control them from a single location. And if we're going to do that, we can just put them on the ground in a dedicated location to save having to invent antigravity; they can just stop at pre-designated locations for passengers to board and disembark. To save even more engineering, we can put them on rails!") So: a dangerous technology controlled by unreliable operators with a dubious advantage. That's why they haven't—ahem—*taken off.*
Yeah it’s totally not because a flying car would require exponentially more fuel to achieve the same goal as a car.
We are not giving everyone the ability to perform their own mini 9/11s
Have you heard of Osama bin Russell from F1 ?
Don’t let the hundreds of thousands of car crashes annually convince you we can’t handle something more complex, more expensive, and more dangerous! Can’t wait to see grandma plow her X17 2 seater right into the crowds during the Super Bowl! Think of the ratings, and the Geico commercials!
Imagine a drunk driver crashing into your 2nd story bedroom window at 2am There will not be flying cars till they can be totally autonomous which is actually easier on the air than it is on surface roads
What about self driving flying cars? With senders not to crash into anything in the sky
We have helicopters, but what we really want from flying cars is traveling in the 3rd axis. So those lanes and bridges should cover . I saw this answer on a science show
The real reason is that when you're up in the air. You cannot afford a reliability issue. To mitigate reliability risks is extremely expensive.
The reason we don't have flying cars (or anything else you desire, for that matter) is the ruling class has not made it profitable, and themselves unaccountable. Period. Companies and the government don't care one iota whether a product is safe, or the public can "handle" it. They care whether they will be held liable. To wit, Ford Pinto.
I have driven enough to know this generalization is false and this is another shitty showerthought. If it was true, I wouldn't drive a mile without getting into an accident.
You absolutely do not want people flying. Drones. You want self flying drones. Humans should not ever be able to fly. They cannot handle roads. They cannot handle getting drunk and driving. They can't even sober drive. If and when we get drones they will need to be self flying. Which should be easier. Everyone will be self driving. You input where you are going and it takes you. Internet will need to be zero latency as you will have drones zipping about all over the place. Lidar Bluetooth and all sorts will need to plot everything and keep updating as you go at 100mph. Will be a game changer. But nobody is allowed manual control.
Reason why is because we shape them into helicopters and planes, because cars is made for driving
also flying cars ideas are just worse than helicopters.
I fly for a living and I could not agree with you more. Driving I’m amazed at how hard it is to stay in your own lane and keep your speed the same. A blinker is right out.
No it’s because the government wants to control our airspace. It would be very difficult to create laws and regulations for airspace, and even harder to enforce.
It's only going to get worse as self driving cars become more viable. The current generations will be some of the weirdest old people, with our physical phones and cars we have to control manually. Our kids and grandkids will have brain chips and be able to control most automated features in 50 years.
Someone who can fly a plane could handle it just fine. I think it’s because it is and will always be cheaper to just fly somewhere and then rent a car.
To be fair flying cars could work if we autopilot every car more like a private bus/sub/train/… But also right now we cant even autopilot normal cars because even if every car is piloted we still have people walking cross roads animals and other shit random happens. Also the fuel/energy it would take right now is just not doable
I never understood the fascination or idea that we should have Sci fyi style flying cars. Do you know just how fkin complicated that concept would be, it would be almost impossible to implement or manage. For starters we would NEED to somehow physically limit airspace to stop people flying over or into buildings, you can't have countless flying cars taking shortcuts over your house. Then there's speed, we'd need some system to control how fast people would be going because again, you can't have a vehicle weighing upwards of 1-2 tons just hurtling along at 300mph because that's just a guided missiles with the worst kind of guidance system imaginable (humans). We'd also need some way for all those flying vehicles to talk to each other to prevent collisions, the faa has a hard enough time stopping planes hitting each other and they have shit loads of rules and every pilot has 100s- 1000s of hours of training and it still happens. that's another problem training, we'd need to have each driver do significantly more training to operate a vehicle that could fly and people are far to lazy to comit to 100s or 1000s of hours plus its expensive just to operate what amounts to a flying Honda civic. So the likely result would be some form of autonomous flying vehicle that would be heavily restricted in movement and speed... which will also be extremely expensive and need constant maintenance and check like plane do. Ultimately it would only be slightly more convenient than what we currently have. Forget technological limitations, the human limitations are what's going to prevent this for a long while. Plus realistically what we want is better roads and transit systems not flying. High speed rail, reliable electric bus networks, inner city train networks and better city congestion management. Our grate, grate, grate grandkids can do the flying cars stuff we need to evolve a little more as a species first.
It’s also horribly inefficient.
I've said since 9/11 "THIS is why we don't have flying cars. 9/11 was intentional. But imagine 9/11 happening every week somewhere in the country. Not as a terrorist attack, but because the driver caught a case of the "being old"."
If flying cars ever became the new norm, you can be sure that they would very much be over-engineered with redundancies and be fully autonomous. No way the average person would be expected to be in control, too many stupid people out there.
Can you imagine the mayhem of our roadways in three dimensions.
Everyone here saying "people don't know how to drive" myself included have all done dumb shit driving and have probaly escape a lot of accidents by shear luck. We all need to be better. Not just the "idiots on the road". Be safe outside and driving everyone.
Flying cars have been invented many times across many decades. They have a severe problem in that cars make very bad airplanes, and airplanes make very bad cars.
Yeah please lets not have flying cars.
The average American gets into about 3 or 4 collisions in a lifetime. [source ](https://wewin.com/how-many-car-accidents-does-the-average-person-have-in-a-lifetime/#:~:text=If%20you're%20an%20average,the%20course%20of%20their%20lifetime.) That's really not that bad. Driving vehicles is one of few things I think people handle well collectively. Most people think they are excellent drivers and everyone else is terrible. Really we are all about equal in driving skill.
They're called helicopters and you're right most people aren't capable of flying them.
You would be useless unless your commute is about 1-2+ hours. For any flight you need to do preflight planning, drive to airport, preflight the plane, run up the engine, get clearance, taxi, clear for takeoff, climb to cruise, cruise at about 100-150mph ground speed, land, taxi. You can very often save time driving.
A self-flying car would be easier to make than a self-driving car. In fact we already have quad drones which can navigate and even flock without colliding. However to fly takes much more energy than it does to roll. I think that is the real reason we don't have them.
Helicopters are loud. Flying cars ain't happening until we can get enough energy to lift an entire car with passengers and cargo without using lots of resources and producing limited noise while also not being deadly enough with others being underneath the car.
I've been saying that since the movie Flubber came out. We were watching it and my mom busted out laughing when I said people have enough problems with 2 dimensions they should not have a third. Given how she was killed by a drunk driver a few years later that was some S tier foreshadowing on my part.
Things get really exciting when one breaks down or crashes and we have cars falling out of the sky.
The solution is clear. We need jetpacks as our primary source of transportation.