I like your point about the number of people in the Lincoln Tunnel and people dying in crashes. I agree it's a genuinely difficult problem, but we might agree

I like your point about the number of people in the Lincoln Tunnel and people dying in crashes. I agree it's a genuinely difficult problem, but we might agree for different reasons. I think it's a genuinely difficult problem because there is no way to make a flying car as safe as a car that is stuck to the ground. There's just not. Normal cars break down, they run out of gas, they stop working all the time. You coast to a stop and call a tow truck. Flying cars break down and you plummet to your death. Normal cars crash into each other in just 2 dimensions. Flying cars crash into each other in three dimensions, and then you plummet to your death. Normal cars get stuck in traffic and sit with their engines at idle, producing small amounts of pollution, noise, wind and heat, yet still contribute substantially to global warming. Flying cars sitting at idle in a traffic jam still have to hover above the ground, which means they're running their engines almost as hard as if they were actually moving, producing tons more waste byproduct than even the most gas-guzzling SUV. Of course, my argument isn't "flying cars are a bad idea", so all of those points might seem offtopic. But it links back to the idea that we already have flying cars and we've already realized that it's a terrible idea. Short of true anti-gravity, a flying car is always going to be less safe, more polluting, more complicated mechanically, and is always a bad idea. If people actually wanted flying cars, we would deal with the downsides long enough for smart people to overcome the reliability and price issues, but overcoming "plummeting to your death" is a genuinely difficult problem that only has one solution: true anti-grav that works even when the power is disconnected. Since that's a far-future sci-fi plot, the closest thing we have to flying cars is a helicopter. It just turns out that using them as reliable daily individual transport is a really bad idea.