Techno-optimism: flying cars

One of the main complaints people have about the age we live in is that we were promised flying cars in the 1950s and 1960s and we got Twitter/X and 140 characters instead. The good news is that there are quite a few companies out there that are developing really compelling prototypes of flying vehicles of various kinds.

One of these is Alef Aeronautics, which received approval from the FAA last year to start test driving and flying its combination of an aircraft and a vehicle. This is an actual flying car in that it can both operate as a car driving on the normal road and fly as a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicle. They intend to start production toward the end of 2025, but I think it will take longer than that.

A second example, from the Netherlands no less, is PAL-V. It can be used as a car and a gyroplane. It does require a runway to get into the air, but you can drive there in car mode, change into fly mode and take off. PAL-V has road approval and delivery is claimed to start in 2026.

In the short term, I believe VTOL aircraft that only fly and can’t be used as a car will be more realistic. Dozens of companies are offering these, many of which require a pilot license. However, some are working air taxis that can be used without a pilot license or with a much easier-to-acquire light aircraft license.

One example is the Jetson One which, at least in the US, can be flown without a pilot license. Of course, this model is fully open and you’ll be exposed to the elements as you operate it. But, boy, does it look like fun to fly. A similar, but different style, vehicle is the Ryse Recon.

One of the key factors is of course safety and this is where eVTOLs have a lot of benefits. Many of these models have extensive redundancy, meaning that one or more motors can fail without the vehicle falling out of the sky. Also, many have autonomous emergency landing solutions that will put them on the ground without any human help.

The main issue that comes up again and again in my research into the topic is regulation. This brings us back to the very reason I started this techno-optimism series. We need regulators who are willing to help create the future with us while ensuring safety both for people flying and those on the ground.

However, we’ll need to take some risks to bring these technologies into the world. We can assess and address many of the risks during design, prototype development and experimentation on a small scale. However, it often requires broad deployment of a new technology to identify the low-incidence risks and corner cases.

Often, ethics is brought up as a concern in these discussions, but I always see only one side of the debate: keeping things as they are to avoid unknown risks. The question I often ask in this context is who’s responsible for all the downsides of the current situation. For instance, well over one million people per year die in traffic accidents according to the World Health Organization. If self-driving vehicles were deployed everywhere, the death toll would be reduced to a fraction of that number, so by delaying the introduction of this technology, we’re sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Who’s responsible for these avoidable fatalities?

Flying vehicles, most likely largely autonomous electric helicopters like scaled-up drones in the beginning, have the potential to address many of the traffic-related challenges many cities face. With increasing urbanization, we can expect traffic jams to continue to be a major and growing issue even if the world population seems to be close to peaking. Imagine thousands of autonomous flying taxis in a city and what it would do for mobility and how much time, energy and frustration we could avoid by not being stuck in traffic. We live in a three-dimensional world. Why not use the third dimension?