Where Are the Flying Cars?

One of the most common complaints I hear from people is where the heck are the flying cars? It turns out building a flying car is much harder than people think.

Lets take a look at some attempts at a flying car. One of the first attempts was done in the 1940's by a man named Ted Hall. Hall was an innovative man and to achieve his goal of a flying car he stuck plane wings on a car and no doubt drowned in praise. The crazy thing was it actually flew but the project was scrapped because of structural issues. Another recent attempt took place in 2003 with the Moller Skycar. The Moller Skycar was designed from the ground up and used four rotapower engines to achieve vertical takeoffs. Unfortunately the Moller Skycar was limited to hovering a short distance and failed to achieve full flight.

Moller Skycar

The main problem with creating a flying car aren't just structural problems but practical design problems as well. In order to be practical a flying car first needs to achieve vertical liftoff. The vehicle needs to be able to transition smoothly from ground to sky and because not everyone has a mile of runway at their disposal vertical liftoff is the only possible solution. The vehicle also needs to be able to easy to operate so that the average person can safely drive it without losing control. Added to all that is the ability to cheaply mass produce while retaining safety feature in case of a crash and the reason we don't have flying cars.