When are we going to see personal flying vehicles as ubiquitous as cars?

Unless they are fully automated, controlled by a central traffic computer, hopefully never.

Nice until an accident happens. It’s a long drop.

^^Long drop high enough to deploy a parachute would be good.

@mazingerz88 You need about 500 meters up for a parachute to work properly.

Flying cars have been just around the corner for 100 years. It will never happen.

One, it takes too much energy staying levitated. Imagine if your car had to provide a couple of hundred horsepower even while stopped at a traffic light.

Two, drivers are bad enough in two dimensions, when they can only hit something on or alongside the road. 40,000 people died in vehicle accidents in the US last year. Increasing their targets almost infinitely won’t make it any better.

Never going to happen.
I am pretty sure we would have to get all kinds of licenses and diplomas, which I’m also sure most of us won’t be able to.
Read: too stupid to.
Have you looked around you, lately, in car traffic?
Half of us are complete, dangerous idiots.

Never. Too many bugs in technology and people.

Sorry I agree with @ragingloli unless totally automated aint ever going to happen,people have made flying cars in the past and they never really took off(sorry for the metaphor) most people not all,but most are too stupid to drive their cars now,can’t imagine if they took to the sky with that same kind of brain power.

We tried removing the “human stupidity” by creating a car that drives itself…didn’t work…they still wreck!!! I go for a walk now & I have to worry about some idiot running up on the sidewalk hitting me. With the flying cars, I’d have to add the thought that it might drop out of the air on top of me…I just lost interest!!! The “human” equation pretty much negates any positive ideas put forward!!!

I once heard it pointed out that the vast majority of energy expended by a car was used just to move that two ton mass of steel.

Thinking along those lines I could see a personal flying device as being much more practical, affordable and probable than personal flying vehicles modeled after the automobile. And, actually, we already have those, they are called airplanes.

I still can’t run out to my driveway late for work, jump in my car & fly off!!! Where will we hang the red lights that so many love to run???

@rojo I was also actually thinking more about bare minimum solo aircraft, probably like a chopper or an iChopper if Apple builds it. : )

Just picture several “iChoppers” crashing through roofs and blowing up houses in each city every night from people texting while flying.

@ragingloli Is spot on, there needs to be a full automation of the system for that to ever work. Elon Musk thinks tunnels are a better approach to traveling in 3 dimensions. In the short-term, he’s certainly right; in the long term I think an automated flying transportation system could potentially be viable, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

iChopper flies high enough, deploys maneuverable parachute if engine stalls. Oh c’mon it could work! :)

Or a bubble-balloon deploys, encapsulates iChopper, drops and bounces all over the place?

We should be working on transporters ala Star Trek. No problems with crashing there. Well, I guess you could embed yourself into something like happened in the Philadelphia Experiment

@rojo You could also turn inside out and explode.
Or get fused with someone else into a new compound being.
Or get duplicated.
Or get scrambled and experience unsurpassed agony in your final moments.

“Montgomery Scott, you are slipping my friend.” : )