Elon Musk was asked why we don’t yet have flying cars; his answer was, “Just Wait For It. It’s Coming,” suggesting he might have something in the works. However, we’ve had actual flying cars since the 1930s, and we had a flying Pinto in the 1970s (as you’d expect, it didn’t end well). And my father had an Alon Aircoupe, a plane designed in the 1930s to be flown like a car is driven. He invested in Moller International and was in line to get one of their flying cars back in the late 19709s, but sadly, he didn’t live long enough to get his flying car (and it isn’t flying yet).

Currently, an impressive number of flying cars are in development, and some are shipping. These range from the PAL-V, which you can buy and is relatively safe, to the Klein Vision car, which is far more advanced; the prototype is flying. Flying air taxis are making even greater progress and likely can operate under the umbrella of helicopter services (I used to use a helicopter service to get to the LA airport before the freeways were built).

Here is why we don’t have a true flying car yet.

Expectations Aren’t In Line With Reality

The expectation for a flying car is you can fly from your home to your destination like you would drive a car. None of the flying cars you can currently buy will work this way unless you live somewhere with an airfield or in a rural area where the rules about where you can fly are reduced. For instance, I worked on a farm in the summers, and my father would often fly and land there for a visit. And if you lived on a farm and worked at another farm, you likely could fly from home to work. Now, my dad was also in the military and would often fly in under the fog to his base, but he took off from a local airport (and if he’d gotten caught, he’d have been in trouble, given this was a SAC base).

But the reality is that today, you can generally only land and take off from an approved landing field or airport. While many buildings still have helicopter landing pads on top, most flying cars can’t take off vertically, making that option, even if FAA-approved, unworkable. There isn’t much space on those old helipads, so this would likely only work for 1-3 people even if you did have approvals. 

Planes Suck As Cars And Cars Suck As Planes

This has been the historic problem, with most of the flying cars that have made it to market they had a car component and a flying component. The flying component is enormous and would need to remain at the airport or be towed as a trailer. In addition, making the car heavy enough to operate amongst other heavy cars was problematic for air performance, and cars aren’t designed to be aerodynamic in the air. So, you ended up with a somewhat inconvenient combination of a plane that flew badly and a car that drove poorly, not to mention having to figure out how to properly store the parts of the vehicle you didn’t need for driving.

You could generally get a better experience by buying or renting a nice plane and then renting a car or, more recently, using a ride-sharing service when you arrive at your airport destination. Airports generally have decent car services, and a plane designed to just be a plane will perform better than a plane designed to be a car, too.

Air Traffic Control

The closest thing to an affordable flying car currently in the market is the Jetson One (it uses NVIDIA technology to reduce pilot load massively and is a human-carrying electric drone. And you can buy one. The problem is, while you don’t need an airport, you can only fly it in areas approved for its class of aircraft (deserts, lake beds, etc.). Assuming you live close enough (a working range of 11 miles), it can fly you from home to work, and you can charge it like an electric car. Here is a video of how you might fly to work. The price is $100K or in line with a luxury sports car. And if you think a 200-mile range on an electric car isn’t enough, you won’t warm to a flying car with 11 miles of range.

The issue is that air traffic control is having problems managing the commercial aircraft currently under its authority and doesn’t have the bandwidth for a large number of these things flying over cities and towns.

The good news is that this problem has to be solved for drone delivery vehicles anyway, so it will eventually be fixed; it just isn’t fixed yet.

Wrapping Up: Air Taxis Will Come First

Electric Air taxis and large-scale delivery drones will likely bring workable flying cars to market in the coming years. These vehicles have the needed range and utility today, and they can either fly under helicopter rules (air taxis) or with special permission for short hops (delivery drones), allowing them to be performant in the near term.

The two major issues that will be critical for personal flying cars you can use like a car (fly from home to your destination without an airport) are air traffic control, which will eventually be handled by AI (the tech is ready; the government isn’t), and a far denser lightweight energy storage technology, which is also in the works but likely at least a decade out before FAA approval. 

So, while you can argue that flying cars have been around for decades, the flying cars we want are still over a decade out. But they are close, and we are making more progress year over year than we previously did decade over decade, which means we are likely to see them well before mid-century.