Top 5 Facts About Flying Cars

A European company called Aeromobile built an operational flying car, if your definition of operational includes malfunctioning, crashing and nearly killing the company’s owner. Krossblade Aerospace has an interesting concept: a vehicle that goes from car, to quadcopter, to airplane. Their Skycruiser is still only a concept, but they’ve employed their so-called switchblade transformation mechanism in a drone that you’ll see be able to purchase. PAL-V is working on this thing. Terrafugia has a working sky car that’s supposedly street legal and has foldable wings. A flying transformer car you can drive?! Calm down there, Friend, you can have one too. Just fork over the 280 thousand dollars that it costs and the keys are all yours! What? You don’t have a quarter of a million dollars to throw at a flying car? Well move along pal because convenience isn’t cheap.There’s a somewhat lower tech option named the Vaylon Pegase which is basically an all terrain buggy equipped with a giant fan and a parachute. Not quite what you had in mind? My, you’re hard to please.

Here’s a scenario. You’re driving down a long winding road, or maybe the uber guy is driving you or maybe you upgraded from an UberX to an UberSelect, but that seems unnecessary– whatever just focus for a second. Suddenly a strong wind picks up and starts blowing your car to and fro! Fortunately, you’re safely strapped to the ground by a ton of metal car parts and you keep on driving safely. Now imagine you’re driving around in the sky, you’re uber sky chauffeur is making polite but unwelcome conversation– hey, would a flying UberX be called an Uber X-Wing? Nevermind. Suddenly a strong wind blows you into the side of a mountain and you and uber red leader are incinerated in a violent but totally predictable explosion. Looks like you should’ve taken a ground car, but it’s too late. Another sad, charred Air Traffic Safety statistic you are. Point being, actual pilots are trained to fly in bad weather, while would-be Uber pilots are only trained to drive and maybe to bullseye womp rats.
 

Hopping in your future car and jetting around the world might sound simple enough but the reality is that our current infrastructure would have trouble supporting the appearance of such machines. Air ways would probably have to be established in order to properly direct traffic to keep cars from crashing into each other and exploding. Air traffic would require air traffic cops to keep a constant vigilant eye on everybody. Even if these road-to-sky vehicles have vertical takeoff and landing, the noise of a city full of helicopters would be deafening! And the birds, why won’t somebody think of the birds?! But, hey, if it’s a good idea, we’ll adjust eventually, right? I mean, paved roads didn’t just spring up overnight once someone invented the automobile, did they?

Fact: traffic jams are the worst. If cars could fly anywhere they want, and take off and land virtually anywhere, then that would eliminate virtually all bottlenecks. So hey, less road rage! Less traffic also means less air pollution, and less air pollution means we can finally breathe some of that sweet sweet oxygen grandpa keeps talking about. If cars are flying everywhere, that means there will be no need to build and maintain expensive highways. Finally, because of the rapid rise in self-driving car technology, and because trusting people in flying contraptions is historically a bad idea, flying cars could potentially be completely automated, so you could sit back, relax and try not to worry that a computer is hurtling you through the air at insane speeds, and that technically...
 

It turns out no matter how you spin it, falling out of the sky is a dangerous endeavour. You can have backup engines, you can have parachutes, you can have all kinds of safety features that, ultimately, could fail. When you’re in a boring old ground car, breaking down isn’t an automatically fatal proposition. If your tires blow out or your engine overheats you can pull over to the side of the safe, gravity-respecting road and call for assistance. When you’re miles in the sky and your fancy new automobird is having some trouble, you have about 30 seconds to really figure out what you did wrong in life. The answer may be all around you as you plummet inextricably towards the unforgiving earth, propelled by the laws of gravity in whose face you so boldly spat when climbing into your flying car.

So what do you think? Are flying cars an attainable goal for technological innovation? Or will they forever remain a symbol of an undeliverable, ultimately disappointing future? For more vertical takeoff Top 10s and womp rat Top 5s, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.