Where are the flying cars?

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I've heard the question "Where are the flying cars?" asked a lot of times and I love hearing it every single time becasue I'm so mad that there are none.

I know why there are no flying cars too. Let's, for a second, consider the visionaries of yesteryear who thought up all the flying cars, robot servents, spaceships that can take you from Earth to the moons of Jupiter in a hour. These guys dreamed of an exciting future full of adventure and awesomeness and they optimistically thought it would come true. They were too optimistic. The people who seriously care about going into space, robot servents, effective personal jetpacks ect. are a minority. Most people want to be entertained. Most people want to see mindless violence. Most people want to communicate with their friends. Technology is made for the majority because you make money by selling to the majority. That's why we have TV with a bajillion channels, internet, the "i-Pad", cell phones that do everything except pick you nose for you and video games that let you almost feel like you're actually running over innocent civilians. That's why we don't have space hotels, ion propulsion, robot servents ect. We don't have flying cars but we have hybrid cars and cars with TVs in them! The mindless masses have no vision. They runined everything. The visionaries of yesteryear didn't take into account how the mindless masses have no vision.

As long as technology continues to be made for the mindless masses, it will continue to not live up to the predictions of the visionaries. Only if technology is made for the visionaries will the predictions of the visionaries come true. Only then will we have our robots that are almost like people and our space oddysseys and our cars that can finally fly!

Unfortunatley I don't any reason why technology is going to start being made for anyone but the mindless masses. Oh, well...

Note: please do not equate "mindless masses" with neurotypicals. That's not what I'm saying.

So we're headed for a society that's more like IDIOCRACY than THE JETSONS (or even BACK TO THE FUTURE 2)?

*shudder*

Someone stop the madness!

Disclaimer: I'm a pilot and we really don't want unqualified people up there.

First issue is licensing. Learning to fly is incredibly complex in comparison to driving. So to make a flying car feasable for the masses we'd need 100% computer control: punch in a destination and the car takes you there. That tech does not exist yet. Even if it did, tech can fail and so there should be a qualified human pilot aboard.

Let's assume that only qualified people could own a flying car, like you said. Second issue then becomes safety. You can't pull over in the air! What if the engine fails? Winged aircraft are inherently safe because they can be landed without an engine. Wings provide lift, and engine provides the forward thrust. A flying car would get all its lift from the engines. So what if the engine failed? The flying car would fall immediately. There are ballistic parachute systems available, yes. They could help if you got a problem at 1000 feet. What if the engine failed at 100 feet? A 100 foot drop is more than enough to kill you. No safety system would be able to deploy in mere 100 feet.

Etc...

The issue of a flying car isn't just the technology. It is also licensing, training, and safety.



I want one. Actually I'd settle for a Cirrus SR22.

It takes a lot of power just to keep something as heavy as a car in the air, even if it has wings. I recall that the Cessna 172 might have worse fuel economy than my truck. A "flying car" would have poor fuel economy, and then there's this issue of where to put the landing strips... There would have to be landing strips for each house or at least each neighborhood, each grocery store, etc. and this quickly grows to seem impractical on cursory examination. It's only when people are transported by the hundreds at a time over large distances that the economy of scale gives air travel a competitive cost and comparatively low fuel consumption on a per-passenger-mile basis.

I don't understand why the auto-pilot technology isn't there. I'm not a pilot, but it's my understanding that:
1) Newer modern planes do have auto-pilot technology that will land a plane. Only human interaction is flipping the correct switch at the right time. They discussed this on a Mythbusters episode with a very experienced flight instructor.

2) If the technology exists for landing a plane, I would think taking off would be the same level of difficulty or easier.

3) I believe that it's common for flight areas to have designated altitudes for flying in a particular direction. There's no reason this couldn't be formalized across the world - basically dividing the skies into a series of invisible lanes. That's one of the great things about moving to a 3D environment - you can avoid intersections.

4) Limiting take-off and landing points to designated areas would prevent the complexity of infinite flight plans.

Obviously you still have mechanical failure issues - but I don't think the auto-pilot programming is the issue.

Extremely fast train travel will be the future.
The use of a vacuum will eliminate drag and maglev technology will theoretically allow unlimited speed. Trains will soon within perhaps be able to go 10,000 km per hour.
The only problem is that the tunneling costs would be super expensive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain


The reason why Flying Cars are not practical are because of the prohibitive cost and low fuel efficiency.

With the lack of low cost energy and the environment problems that our current consumption bring, we won't see flying cars anytime soon. But if cold fusion can work, then maybe...