The Future of the Flying Car

[Turborama]

Carlo Rotella

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Terrafugia, a company based in Woburn, Mass., says it’s getting close to putting a flying car into production. Terrafugia’s Transition is really an airplane-that-rolls more than a car-that-flies, but still, you will be able to fly it between airports and also drive it on streets and highways. Among the features that can be yours for a list price of $279,000 are patented electromechanical folding wings, an airframe parachute, all-wheel hydraulic disc brakes, and a golf club storage compartment. Also, the company’s promotional literature adds, “you can call it your ‘flying car.’”

This development should make any remaining fans of the future very happy. There used to be a lot more of them. As other commentators have recently pointed out, including Edward Rothstein of The New York Times and Virginia Postrel of Bloomberg, Americans used to be high on the future. Its reputation boomed during the first two-thirds of the 20th century, from the era of horseless carriages, skyscrapers, and global expansion through the golden age of World’s Fairs and science fiction, the rise of robotics and aviation, and the postwar era of “The Jetsons” and the space race, arriving at a climax in, say, 1969, the year of both the first moon landing and the final season of the original “Star Trek.”

The flying car, a symbol of the expansion of individual freedom and the conquering of physical limits made possible by technological advances, was a frequently recurring figure in these imagined futures. It wouldn’t be just superheroes and astronauts who could fly; it would be families, average citizens, everybody.

Then the future began to fall into disrepute. The crises of the 1960s and especially the 1970s – riots, a lost war, the rise of OPEC, stagflation – helped set the new tone. By 1982, in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” an enormously influential science-fiction portrait of the near future, the flying car had turned definitively noir. Cops lifted off in them from decaying, ungovernable streets, nosing through the perpetual twilight of neon-lit pollution.

These days we seem to have even less use for sunny visions of the future, instead favoring zombie plagues, enslavement by machines, endless young-adult dystopias, and apocalypses of every stripe. Then, in the real world, there’s climate change, peak oil, and more esoteric forms of resource depletion (we’re running out of magnesium?!), the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent, and the imperial tristesse that infuses the idea of America’s declining power in the world.

The skies of the future are no longer filled with flying cars. Maybe I’m just typical of my time, or maybe the cultural moment has come around to better fit my own flatliner tendency, but this comes as a relief to me. Judging from how poorly we handle the gee-whiz technologies of the present, I can’t help but see the flying car as death from above. Emboldened by the myth of multi-tasking, we’re hellbent on operating our plain old ground-bound motor vehicles while eating, drinking, texting, emailing, trying to follow GPS directions, and talking on the phone – even if it kills us and anyone in our way. Flying cars would just add spectacular new opportunities to demonstrate incompetence behind the wheel, yielding midair collisions that rain flaming debris onto our streets and homes.

Why does this culture tell itself this story in this way at this time? That’s an essential question at the heart of American Studies, my scholarly field. Americans used to tell themselves lots of stories about flying cars because they gave us ways to think about the possibilities for a better life associated with exciting new technology. Now, though, at the moment when the flying car is no longer a pipe dream, that romantic vision of progress overleaping all limits seems obsolete. If flying cars still did figure prominently in our imagined future, what would they be good for, other than a temporary escape from the zombies running amok at ground level?

The flying car can’t stay up there in the blue sky forever. It has to land again sometime, and when it does, you’ll be right back in the middle of the mess we’ve made.

http://m.utsandiego.com/news/2012/dec/23/the-future-of-the-flying-car/

[BlueStreak]

1. It will be impressive if they can pass the highway crash safety tests.

The thing weighs under 1000 pounds.

Such a vehicle has been contemplated ever since the Wright Brothers. I remember growing up, about every year Popular Science would feature the "flying car" on the front cover, always saying the era of flying cars for everybody was just around the corner. That was obviously nonsense because we could never manage an airspace with thousands, or even hundreds, of these things flying over your typical city every day.

But I could certainly see some niche uses for this technology, particularly in more remote areas.

They project 35 MPG driving on the highway. That's pretty good.

[Turborama]

2. It's truly dissapointing that 35 MPG is considered pretty good as a projection

When Ford have been making 64 MPG cars for Europe - not the US - for several years already...

http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2008/07/fords_64_mpg_car---for_europe_not_us.html

Agree with the rest of your analysis, though...

[BlueStreak]

3. It is not designed for high MPG.

We are reaching the limits of what we can get out of a gasoline-powered vehicle. To get above about 70 or 80 MPG, the compromises are so great that you really can't call it a car.

The next frontiers are either batteries or a renewable fuel like hydrogen (fuel cells).

I doubt that we will ever see an order of magnitude improvement in energy density with chemical batteries as we know them today. Maybe we will get a 100% improvement or a 200% improvement. So the only way that technology becomes dominant is of they can take on a charge quickly (10 minutes or less) and we develop charging stations that as a re convenient as today's gas stations.