Not the air show. Just a rehearsal. One vehicle went up into flames. No deaths, one seriously injured.
Saved you a click.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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Damn, traffic was that bad huh?
“Flying car” is a bullshit term. They are aircraft and must be treated as such.
“Jet” is a bullshit term. They are aircraft and must be treated as such.
Jet is a form of propulsion shortened to describe an aircraft. Jet aircraft, prop aircraft, etc. It is not a “bullshit” term.
Yes, these “cars” are aircraft.
People can't even handle a zip merge, da fuck we need flying cars for, lmao, another technobro invention that only thinks about the individual and not the wider effect on society
The cars are autonomous, we need them because people can’t even manage a zip merge.
And thus the reason we don't have flying cars. That was two. Imagine the flaming hell that would be raining down if we had commute traffic numbers in the sky.
We don't have flying cars because technology has not progressed enough to make it economically viable for the masses.
We don't have flying cars because people are fucking dumb, and because the viable options are loud as hell.
We absolutely have the technology, and if there were a drive to make it affordable there would be more significant research into doing so.
To do a flying car, you need to simulate friction in the air, with significant enough force to prevent colision, while also maintaining low enough noise pollution to be acceptable to the average citizens. This second part is why we don't have Personal helicopters, despite aircraft being relatively affordable (in my cursory search I found two Helicopters less than 200K, one barely more than 100k, if there were significant drive to make them mainstream for the public they'd presumably be much cheaper, benefitting from economies of scale.)
Additionally, how do we as a society handle ATC for flying cars? Emergency stops? Impromptu repairs? Birds in the props‽
I'm not trying to naysay the retrofuturistic image we all want for the world. I am saying it probably shouldn't include flying cars. Especially if they're just Personal quadcopters.
We don’t need cars, nobody has even built highways or gas stations or traffic cops yet.
even in the future nothing works
Just in case anyone was wondering why we don't do that.
Couldn't people say the same shit when regular cars were new and there was an accident?
"That's why you'll never see thousands of them going down a highway at 80 miles an hour." -1920s idiot who needs to get their crystal ball checked.
Sure, a person might have said that. They'd have been right about the danger but wrong about our risk tolerance. It's hard enough to keep people from becoming water balloons in a simple collision on the ground (though things have definitely improved in that regard over the past century). It's also a much bigger problem to run out of fuel or have an engine failure in midair than on the ground in the vast majority of situations.
That’s why aircraft regulations require safety systems, redundancy.
There are safety systems, like parachutes, which can save ultralight aircraft even on total power loss.
Now imagine hundreds of them populating the skies over a densely populated city, just to carry a few hundred rich people around.
When you say it like that, it sounds better in some ways and worse in others.
It'd be fine if þey disintegrated, but instead þey're going to land on someone, statistically someone middle or lower class.
You take the rough with the smooth
helicopters.
Yes, and how many helicopters fly regular passengers over your city?
There's a reason these are speciality vehicles for speciality operations, and not a generic form of transport used all the time.
exactly. there are hundreds of them populating the sky, lugging a few hundred rich people (or their representatives) around.
You need a fully automated and certified air traffic control first. That's only been discussed for a free decades now so any time now it'll arrive. Nah, nobody wants to put in any funding or take on the liability.
It’s like saying we need traffic police and highways before we can have cars.
These things exist now, so we’re going to need to address their use or ban them and have our country fall behind in technology and manufacturing. Other countries are making them, if we’re not building similar industries then we’re losing.
Is that even a car? It just looks like a massive drone.
yeah these drone conveyances are not exactly like the moller concept.
Cars travel on the ground. These are indeed massive drones with the capacity to lift humans. The media won't give up "The Jetsons" flying car term (regardless of how impractical and unsafe the concept of layman operating in 3D space is). These are just electric, multi-rotor aircraft. My rant is over.
I don't know about your definition. The term comes from a two-wheeled chariot it seems (though the etymology of that seems to be a word meaning "to run"). It's been used from everything from chariots, to train cars, to street cars, to automobiles. They all share two things in common. They're an enclosed container meant to carry things, and they've got wheels.
I don't think the wheel thing is fundamental to the definition anymore. Anything traveling on the ground is going to have wheels. The "flying" part let's you know how it travels, the car part informs you about the utility. I think it's perfectly clear what it means. What else should we call it that'd be more clear?
Autonomous ultralight electric quad rotary aircraft rolls off the tongue quite well.
We need this on every military parade.