I’ll believe in flying cars when I see them

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/05/2017 (3408 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It seems like flying cars are everywhere these days — except, of course, in the air.

It’s virtually impossible to turn on your TV, flip through a magazine, or read a newspaper without stumbling on some breathless description of the latest plan for a flying vehicle.

I forced myself to spend several valuable minutes contemplating this topic recently because one of my editors kindly forwarded me a Washington Post news report about the imminent arrival of commercialized flying cars.

According to the Post — and they almost never make this stuff up — flying cars are an idea whose time has come.

Based on the parts of the story I understood, a sports car/airplane combo called the AeroMobil Flying Car is expected to land by 2020, while something called the Kitty Hawk Flyer, an all-electric Jet-Ski-style craft, might possibly show up by year’s end.

Based on the Post report and dozens of other online news stories, it seems that everyone is getting into the flying-car game. For example, app-driven car service Uber wants to create an on-demand network of flying cars — called VTOLs because they could take off and land vertically — that would be available for regular daily trips.

The website EnGadget.com says even Toyota is joining the craze by flinging big bucks at a group working on a drone-like vehicle that would fly 10 metres above the ground at speeds of up to 100 km/h and, fingers crossed, be commercialized in time to light the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games torch.

Q: Is this exciting scientific news, or what?

A: Ha ha ha! No!

Excuse me for being overly cynical, but I have heard all of this overheated flying-car talk before. I realize that, what with being a guy of my particular gender, I should be over the moon, but I am more than a little skeptical.

The main problem is that I grew up in the 1960s, which, assuming my calculator is functioning correctly, was roughly 50 years ago. Back then, impressionable kids such as myself used to read magazines like Popular Mechanics, the cover of which always featured awe-inspiring artist’s renditions of a glowing future.

Those magazines promised that, by the year 2000 at the latest, we would all be living in fabulous domed underwater cities, feasting on five-course meals stuffed into pills the size of breath mints, solving crimes with our wise-cracking robot sidekicks and, best of all, zooming to work in our personal jetpacks or flying cars.

We knew exactly what our flying cars would look like, because every kid on the block watched the 1960s animated TV show The Jetsons, wherein George Jetson and his “modern space-age family” had a robot maid named Rosie and George commuted to work at Spacely Space Sprockets in his aerocar, which was a sort of flying saucer with a transparent bubble top.

The point is, if we are to believe all the hype we see on TV and read in the… um… magazines… the age of Jetsons-style flying cars is just around the corner. As I think I might have said earlier in this column: “Ha ha ha!”

I hate to say this, but I firmly believe “some places” are not ready for the arrival of flying cars, and by “some places” I mean “places where I currently live, such as Winnipeg.”

Prepare to become unreasonably angry: I do not think Winnipeggers are ready to get behind the wheel (I assume they have wheels) of a flying car. This is because Winnipeggers are arguably the world’s worst drivers.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about you. Based on the sensitive way you are reading this column, it is obvious you are a superior driver and could easily navigate down an icy street at NASCAR-level speeds without obliterating your entire neighbourhood.

I’m talking here about the rest of the drivers in this city, who, in my view, are borderline homicidal maniacs, people who believe it is illegal to drive behind another vehicle, so they break the sound barrier to get in front of you, at which point they slow their car down until they are driving at the same speed as airport luggage. This is extremely annoying.

If we let people like this operate flying cars, imagine the chaos that would ensue: Vehicles would be plummeting from the skies like multi-coloured metal leaves in the autumn. It would be extremely hazardous.

Personally, if I wanted to take an air trip and end up a bloody, battered, broken mess, it would be far easier just to book a seat with United Airlines and then refuse to get off when they announced the flight was overbooked.

You know what scares me? I’ll tell you what scares me. Based on a typical Winnipeg winter, people in this city would insist on zooming around in their flying cars without bothering to sweep off the massive cap of snow covering their transparent bubbles, which means they would be flying blind.

Not to mention the fact that our family dogs would insist on sticking their heads out the windows of our flying cars, and that could only end in tears.

And what would happen when a police officer in his black-and-white flying vehicle pulled you over and hopped out of his flying car? I can see it now:

Police officer: “Do you have any idea how fast you were flying?”

You: “Not a clue, officer. Did you know there isn’t any ground under your feet right now?”

Police officer (plummeting): “AIIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!”

The point — and I definitely have one today — is that we have been promised flying cars before and none of those brighter futures ever came to pass. Now, we are hearing the same overexcited scientific rhetoric.

Having been burned before, I will believe in flying cars when one of them lands on my (bad word) head.

And, according to everything I’ve read, that should be any day now.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca