Science fictions from the 19th and 20th centuries tended to become the science facts of today. Automobiles are now ubiquitous. Air travel is common. Computers are everywhere, even in handheld devices. The internet has sped up communication so much that many fret over the social problems this has created. With those fiction-to-fact transformations in mind, why don’t we have flying cars yet?
Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson famously said the future is “already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed,” and that appears to be the case with flying cars. For those with enough pull, it’s possible to at least test-fly some vehicles that could be described as flying cars. However, these are still rare, expensive, and typically not exactly what folks have in mind from seeing these vehicles in the movies.
WATCH: FLYING CAR TAKES FIRST PUBLIC TEST FLIGHT
That could be changing, however, over the next decade.
“Urban and advanced air mobility — a segment that includes electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft — enjoyed record funding in 2021: roughly $6.9 billion in new investments. Funding cooled in 2022, partly as a result of macroeconomic conditions, but remained well ahead of its pre-pandemic pace,” consultancy McKinsey and Company announced in a March report.
“Leading eVTOL players are following aggressive timelines, hoping to achieve important certifications by the mid-2020s,” the McKinsey report stated. “Meanwhile, incumbents are trying to catch up: 72% of the largest 25 aircraft OEMs and 64% of the largest 25 suppliers now participate in some type of advanced air mobility activity. The upcoming year will pose a crucial test for entrants that wish to stay on the path for near-term flight certification.”
The report was titled “Future Mobility 2022: Hype Transitions into Reality.” The cover featured a take on where flying cars are likely headed. Much previous speculation had mass-produced flying vehicles driven by rockets, which exist but are volatile, or some sort of antigravity field, which does not yet exist. Most of the current efforts, as highlighted by McKinsey with a large white helicopter-like vehicle with a tail and one wing/fan on either side soaring over a city, are more like small helicopters, gyrocopters, or really large drones.
Dutch company Pal-V, which fashions its Liberty vehicle the “world’s first flying car production model,” will eventually make 90 Pioneer Editions available to buyers at a cost of about $600,000 per.
“We have partnered with some of the leading manufacturers in the world to guarantee a flying car that meets the aviation standards,” Pal-V says on its website. “The Pioneer Edition is for those that want to be part of the group of 90 that writes history with us. They will be at the forefront of a mobility revolution, where we will no longer have cars that can only drive. They will be the first carflyers in their country, flydriving to any destination.”
When driving, the Pal-V sort of looks like a normal car, except that it has a large apparatus on its roof. This unfolds into a gyrocopter design, with a large rotor overhead and one behind and a tail, for flying.
Or take a Swedish company called — no joke — Jetson. Its Jetson One promises to get pilots places for just under $100,000 per.
The Pal-V promises to be street-legal — at least in the Netherlands. The Jetson makes no such promises because, at least according to the company’s promotional video, it doesn’t have wheels. It rather resembles a one-person driving cage surrounded on four sides by rotors, like a drone.
Whether the investment in such vehicles leads to mass adoption is something that is hard to predict at this point. One reason for that is the current regulatory paradigm for air transport is an airport-to-airport model. For these kinds of flying vehicles to become more widespread, that would have to change.
“Advanced air mobility involving small electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, commonly referred to as flying cars, remains in its infancy,” Reason Foundation transportation policy analyst Marc Scribner told the Washington Examiner.
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On the one hand, he admitted, “Some developers are beginning to receive the prerequisite regulatory approvals needed to manufacture and operate these aircraft at scale and have proposed ambitious development and deployment timelines.”
On the other hand, “It remains to be seen how large this market will be in the next decade, and numerous issues related to airworthiness certification, airspace integration, and ground infrastructure have not yet been addressed,” he said.
