Why everyone’s talking about... Flying cars

General Motors has unveiled a prototype flying Cadillac, an electric car capable of carrying a passenger at 56mph across city skylines. It plans to go into mass production by 2023. It’s been a long time coming!

The technology, so familiar in fiction from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, below, to Bladerunner, always seems to be just around the corner. In 1917, just 14 years after the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight, a US patent was granted for the Curtiss Autoplane, a car with wings. In 1923 the UK’s director of civil aviation said flying machines for the price of a cheap car would be available ‘soon’, and in 1940 Henry Ford said: ‘A combination airplane and motor car is coming. You may smile. But it will come.’

So is it REALLY happening now?

Dozens of prototypes are being worked on to spearhead a business that could be worth £1 trillion a year. Most are vertical take-off and landing craft that would operate as automated Uber-style taxis. (Uber sold its electric car division last year.) Rolls-Royce, Intel, Boeing, Airbus, Richard Branson and Google’s

Larry Page have all invested in the tech and last year Bristol’s Vertical Aerospace claimed to be just four years away from commercially operating flying taxis with a 100-mile range.

All very high-tech…

Some attempts were less so: in 2018, Frenchman Bruno Vezzoli flew a dunebuggy/paraglider hybrid across the English Channel. An earlier bid to travel from London to Timbuktu via a similar ‘Skycar’ was grounded by more mundane issues: Civil Aviation Authority paperwork. It eventually managed a couple of short flights, until the inventor managed to crash into a tree in the sparsely vegetated Sahara.

Like driverless cars, safety seems to be an issue!

Flying cars need to be super-reliable – but with self-drive vehicles, at least drivers wouldn’t have to be pilots too. Computers would most likely be used to control swarms of the vehicles to stop them crashing… at least in theory. Less obviously, one think- tank said flying cars pose a threat to democracy as they would ‘skew the political priorities of elites by allowing them to further opt out of societal problems’ – such as avoiding traffic jams.

So, what’s the verdict?

Flying cars? They’ll never take off.