Why we still do not have "Flying Cars"?

[gemini6187]

I say the technology is already here, and today's engineers can produce a "flying car" like in the Jetsons cartoon. However, I believe the answer is because of the logistics of dealing with air space. Right? How are we going to manage the air space with current airplanes & other air craft? Also, the safety factor would be an issue. Would a flying car, that stalls, immediately plummet to the Earth?

[john]

I think it would be a horrible idea, Imagine drunk driving/bad drivers with flying cars. It would make tragedies like 9/11 a regular occurrence.

[Roark Doser]

it costs to much, not in actual\l money of course, i mean for its value, alot of acidents would occur, what we need it cars that drive them selfs first then we can go onto flying cars.

[Alex]

Safety would be a major issue. Even a minor accident or mechanical problem could result in major injury or death and the car would be destroyed. Insurance would be obscene.

[mecnek]

We do have flying cars but they're licensed as aircraft. You need a pilots licence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo0MEQSGW8w

Depending on the design various different risks are involved in flying one. The retractable wing design is likely the safest followed by the retractable rotor design. The most dangerous type would be anything designed with jet propulsion and no wings...even the harrier with wings is dangerous. I'm no knocking jet power its perfectly safe provided one doesn't suck up debris, but I am stressing the importance of the lift of wings.

[Gary H]

Projections 50 years ago predicting flying cars for everyone by now took one thing for granted - that average wealth in this country would continue to increase at the rate it had been prior to that. The technology for flying cars has been around for quite awhile, but is still expensive. Unfortunately, ever since the Reagan years, our standard of living has not increased, but dropped thanks to free trade, global commercialism, and the shift of real production to foreign countries (thank you, company-wrecking MBA's like Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, etc.) In the 60's, my dad was a welder at a cement plant. He made enough ($6/hr, back when the minimum wage was $1.65/hr) to buy a sprawling $25,000 5-bedroom home in SoCal and support my stay-at-home mom and us 5 kids. A couple years after buying that house, he had a built-in pool installed. Can someone making less than 4 times minimum wage do that now?

There are a LOT of things we should have now, serious things like artificial organs, orbiting manufacturing cities, dirt-cheap green power, and maybe even flying cars. But we haven't been able to continue to progress in living standard to obtain them. This generation doesn't know what they're missing because they're too distracted by their iPods and Facebook.

Ok, soapbox mode off.... back to the garage to work on my homebuilt jetpack.

[gatorbait]

They also have a tendency to drop like a rock at every red light they come to.

[Ray;mond]

Those are all good answers. Imagine a million flying cars over the 100 cubic kilometers of a large city = 10,000 per cubic kilometer and that is average. My guess, to minimize collisions, all fly at an altitude in meters equal to three times the azimuth (1083 meters is 1 degree East of North) = direction of flight and all at 300 kilometers per hour = not much fun. You can spiral up or spiral down = all near by craft are moving about the same direction and speed, like the center lane of a very busy highway, but three dimensional. Every craft needs short range radar gathering data in all 6 directions that it sends to a giant computer which is traffic control. Humans have too slow reaction time, so perhaps the pilot can do nothing, but close his eyes and pray when something goes wrong. Neil