Hobby pilot here. This is one of my pet topics. A "flying car" is like "land-running sailboat" - a "flying car" wouldn't be anything like a car, but would serve

Hobby pilot here. This is one of my pet topics. A "flying car" is like "land-running sailboat" - a "flying car" wouldn't be anything like a car, but would serve the same purposes. Journalists always make this mistake. Möller's approach won't work because their design uses too much energy. We need a design that combines the great fuel efficiency of a good airplane with the VTOL capability of a helicopter. This could be done. Some of the remaining issues which make this difficult are, in short: Mechanical reliability (you can't just pull over if the engine fails) Existing regulation (airspaces are organized manually, rigidly and labor-intensively) Liability (one lawsuit after a crash and a new company is history) Investment (aviation is really expensive and no one wants to touch it) Weather (the plane must work in clouds and darkness) Training (landing a plane is a little harder than driving a car) I think the wheather issue cannot be budged in the forseeable future - sometimes it's just not safe to fly. So these hypothetical machines can't replace cars. In my opinion, most of the problems in this field are related to the US political climate for aviation. Due to airline disasters, all of aviation is kept to a really strict safety standard, and any failure can and will be sued to oblivion privately. The problems that these "flying car" companies are actually shared by every company that tries to make progress in aviation. If you do anything that doesn't use 1960s technology, you have mountains of certification and bureaucracy before you. For this reason, most of the really cool planes are certified as experimental designs, and you have to assemble them yourself. The existing air traffic control system employs thousands of people and is very resistant to change. It is very labor- and training-intensive, both on the part of the controller and the pilot. But the part of it that doesn't involve airliners could be automated if it wasn't for the culture of excessive safety. I actually wrote a comprehensive article about this last summer, but I'm really self-conscious and didn't publish it. Pehaps I should.