The flying car is the little engine that couldn’t fly in real till now. But they’ve been on the covers of magazines since the end of World War II. Henry Ford built a flying Flivver in the 1920s. Terrafugia is the current standard bearer, prototypes have flown but none have shipped. Elon Musk might build a flying car, he says, and he’s a man who has built rocket ships, so for him maybe it’s not that difficult. The one thing flying cars haven’t done is become a commercial product.
The flying car business has three segments. The most successful is writing about flying cars being just around the corner; this has been a staple of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science when Truman was President. Then there’s writing that flying cars will never fly,that’s solid, too, the latest being “Flying Cars: The Idea That Will Not Die” in IEEE Spectrum. The third and weakest leg is building and selling them. With the recent advent of lighter composite materials, there still may be hope, but so far, it feels like flying cars might be like fusion power,always just a few years away.
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