Are Flying Cars Finally Here?
They have long been a symbol of a future that never came. Now a variety of companies are building them—or something close.
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Alittle more than a decade ago, Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm run by the entrepreneur, investor, and political gadfly Peter Thiel, issued a proclamation called “What Happened to the Future?” As an investment thesis, it was underwhelming—it advanced biotechnology, energy, and the Internet as smart bets—but it was received as something of a spiritual treatise. Thiel was best known for his early investment in Facebook, but he believed that the nation had become sluggish. We might have been attempting to terraform nearby planets or surmount death. Instead, we made apps. His statement belonged to the genre of the writer F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which proposed that Italy’s moribund museum culture be razed in favor of a machine cult of speed and steel: “We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is the very first sunrise on earth!” Thiel, no poet, was punchier: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
“Where’s my flying car?” quickly caught on as a meme in Silicon Valley and beyond. For Thiel, one culprit was obvious: regulators. In a contentious debate, he told Eric Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Google, that Schmidt was doing “a fantastic job as Google’s minister of propaganda,” but that the company had capitulated to an ethos of caution. “We’ve basically outlawed everything having to do with the world of stuff, and the only thing you’re allowed to do is in the world of bits,” he said. The economist Tyler Cowen offered a more neutral assessment in his book “The Great Stagnation,” writing that perhaps “the low-hanging fruit has been mostly plucked.” The complaint found surprising allies. The late anthropologist David Graeber, who at the time had no clue who Thiel was, wrote, “A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like.” The question? “Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars?” Graeber blamed bureaucratic risk aversion and corporations concerned only with short-term capitalist incentives. By 2020, when the investor Marc Andreessen grumbled, in one of his routine tirades, that we still didn’t have flying cars, it felt almost dutiful.
While one segment of Silicon Valley lamented the perpetual absence of flying cars, another, it turns out, was quietly building them—or, at least, something flying-car adjacent. Just three months after the Founders Fund manifesto appeared, a Canadian inventor named Marcus Leng invited his neighbors and a couple of friends to his rural property, north of Lake Ontario. Leng was in his early fifties, with a bowl cut of coarse graying hair. He instructed his guests to park their (conventional) cars in a row and cower behind them. He strapped on a helmet and boarded a device that he’d built in his basement. It had a narrow single-seat chassis and two fixed wings, one in front and one in back, each with four small propellers. It was at once sleek and ungainly, as if a baby orca had been hitched to two snowplows. Observers described it, for lack of a better comparison, as looking like a U.F.O. Leng called it the BlackFly.
Leng, who had been flying since he was a teen-ager, had long dreamed of the “perfect aircraft”—something “that didn’t require a pilot’s license, and could take off or land anywhere.” He’d paid close attention to past designs but suspected that their propulsion systems were too heavy, too complex, and too unresponsive. In the previous few years, however, he’d noticed that full-sized remote-control airplanes had all of a sudden become very good: they had enough power to hover and could be controlled with precision. It was nevertheless an entirely different thing to put a person inside one. He told me recently, “The original had no redundancy built into it at all, and any single point failure would result in a total failure. It was fundamentally unsafe.” At his demo, the BlackFly’s propellers came online with a whine, then a purr, and it lifted into a hover about a metre off the ground. He pitched forward, in the direction of his guests. He’d thought that he would pivot into a skidding stop, in the manner of a skier. As he initiated a banking turn, though, the edge of one wing caught on the lawn. “I thought, This is not going to end well,” he said. But the craft held steady, dug a curving divot through thirty feet of grass, and came to rest. The trip lasted about twenty seconds. It was, as far as anyone knew, the first manned flight in an “electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle,” or evtol (pronounced “ee-vee-tall”).
Today, there are more than four hundred startups in what is called the “advanced air mobility” industry. The term covers everything from actual flying-car-ish contraptions to more traditional-looking airplanes, but it generally refers to evtols. For the most part, these crafts bear a greater resemblance to helicopter-plane hybrids than to automobiles, and they can’t be driven on the road; they might better be described as electric aerial vehicles with the ability to hover and the no-fuss point-to-point flexibility of a car. Some are single-seat playthings: Jetson One, a Swedish company, has developed a craft that looks like a little aerodynamic cage and handles like Luke Skywalker’s X-wing. Others fly themselves: EHang, a Chinese company, has been testing an autonomous passenger drone with a quadcopter design. (Its Chinese name translates to Ghost Intelligent Aerial Robot.) The first widespread use will be for air taxis—initially with pilots, then without—that will move passengers between neighborhood “vertiports.” Matthew Clarke, a postdoctoral fellow in aeronautical engineering at M.I.T., said, “In a best-case scenario, we’re seeing certification in two years and flying two or three years after that.” The 2028 Summer Olympics, in Los Angeles, may feature the ferrying of athletes through the air from the village to their stadiums. Regular civilians, or at least the courageous among them, could have access to such services by the end of the decade. One company promises a seven-minute trip from Manhattan to an airport, with an aspiration to land inside security; seat prices would eventually be competitive with rideshares. Proponents imagine a system of cheap, sustainable aerial transit—ribbons of humming vehicles interlaced overhead.
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