Why Flying Cars Are an Impossible Dream
The air taxi is the Godot of technology: always on its way, never here.
The flying car is the Godot of technology: always on its way, never here. Ninety years ago, Henry Ford envisioned an experimental one-seat airplane called the sky flivver, only to abandon the project when one of the first prototypes crashed, killing the pilot. In the 1950s, the U.S. Army commissioned the development of “flying jeeps” with private-sector partners like Chrysler. The project never amounted to much. Today, flying cars figure most prominently not in urban skylines, but in venture-capital tag linesas in Peter Thiel’s motto: “We chronicled the ascendant hopes and stalled realities of air-taxi development around the world.)
