Why are there no flying cars?

I remember watching The Flintstones and The Jetsons as a child and being fascinated by the differences between the two periods depicted. He also really wanted to see how the world of the future developed, especially flying cars. We were even shown a Delorean-shaped flying car in Back to the Future, when Doc traveled to the year 2015.

However, with all the technology we came up with, there still isn’t a flying car. Why is that? We’ve been flying for almost a century and have come a long way in terms of the automobile, why haven’t we been able to get off our roads and take to the air to eliminate traffic? In a simple statement, government regulations and social networks.

When cars were first invented, there weren’t dozens of government bureaucracies dictating bumper height, fuel economy, five-mph crash tests, etc., etc. So inventors were free to pursue their wishes and create road trips. Now imagine trying to start a car company today. Unless you have a bank account in the nine to ten figure range or have some deep pockets to back it up, there’s no way you can do it. Try playing in your garage and creating a new vehicle and then try to get a license for road use. There’s barely a chance you’ll be able to do it, and even if you managed to get approval for personal use, then you’d need to build almost a hundred and put them through all sorts of government tests before you’d get approval to sell it.

So as a society we are stuck on our roads for most hours of the day instead of being able to use our skies. But we are resilient beings, and our desire to avoid traffic somehow fueled the invention of social media. We no longer have to visit our friends and family to stay in touch with their lives. We just communicate with them through the myriad of social media and never have to leave our homes. We feel connected to them, we are part of their special moments, and we feel connected and included. But I rarely see them in person.

So it looks like we’ve solved our traffic problems without the flying car. Traffic will decline as the next generations reach adulthood and choose digitized, instantaneous, wireless communication over live face-to-face interaction. We all become zeros and ones and we won’t need the flying car. sad huh? Especially if your kids ask you to help them create a flying car.