The audience at the 2008 Electric Aircraft Symposium in Silicon Valley late last month was given a “vision of the future” in which everyone has a personal car/plane that they can drive or fly (or read the paper while it drives/flies itself, actually), and which will be the “greenest form of transportation” (BBC; Wired). When will this future be? Oh, in 20 years or so they said.

Sounds great. But people have been predicting a helicopter-in-every-garage for decades; inventors have been working on flying cars, of the type intended for the masses, since at least the 1930s. Check out this cover of Popular Mechanics from 1951…

Is that vision now really going to come true? Technologies have improved of course, and companies offering up this vision seem to have abounded in recent years (eg Register, 2007; see a full list in the Roadable Times).

I’m not holding my breath yet. And I can’t help but wonder, if you can make self-flying battery-powered planes for everyone that are smart enough to avoid hitting each other in flight, why not just make smarter, self-driving, battery-powered cars? The main reason for gridlock is not so much the number of cars on the road, but delays in reaction time and other inefficiencies of the all-too-human drivers. Solve that and I don’t think you need to fly.