Flying cars pave way for airborne road rage

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/07/2021 (1850 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When I was an impressionable kid growing up on the West Coast. I knew exactly what the future was going to look like.

Back in the 1960s, a fabulous future was displayed in awe-inspiring, full-colour artist’s renditions in the pages of Popular Mechanics magazine, and in the ultra-cheesy science-fiction movies that I watched on the black-and-white TV in the basement of my family home.

Those glitzy magazine stories and movies 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, solving crimes with our wisecracking robot sidekicks and, best of all, zooming to work in our personal jetpacks.

But more than anything, the future was going to be all about flying cars.

I knew in my heart what flying cars were going to look like, because every kid on my block was glued to the 1960s animated TV show The Jetsons, wherein George Jetson commuted to work at Spacely Space Sprockets in his aerocar, which was a sort of flying saucer with a transparent bubble top.

In the 1960s, that amazing car was little more than a dream, but today the dream appears ready to take off, because on June 28, the AirCar Prototype 1 — a dual-mode car-aircraft vehicle designed by Slovakian tech company Klein Vision — completed its first historic inter-city flight.

The prototype AirCar spent 35 minutes in the air en route from Nitra to the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, and was piloted in this pivotal voyage by its inventor and CEO of Klein Vision, professor Stefan Klein.

My wife and I looked on in wonder as footage showed Klein safely landing and transforming the aircraft into a sleek road-legal sports car with the click of a button — a transformation that took less than three minutes. After retracting the wings, Klein drove his flying car off the runway into downtown Bratislava.

“This flight starts a new era of dual transportation vehicles,” is what the inventor said when he exited the vehicle. “It has turned science fiction into reality.”

Despite having spent much of my life dreaming of the day flying cars would finally arrive, I am a little skeptical.

Apparently I am not the only one. Here’s what a U.S. think tank called Centre for American Progress has to say about flying cars: “The inevitable reality is that flying cars will confer advantages on direct users while exacerbating the geographic isolation of elites — a spatial manifestation of deepening inequality that undermines the shared experiences that are necessary to sustain democracy.”

What exactly does that mean? I don’t have a clue. My main concern is I do not believe Winnipeggers are ready to get behind the wheel of a flying car, because Winnipeggers are arguably the world’s worst drivers. (I am not talking about you because, based on the sensitive manner in which you are reading today’s column, it is obvious you have NASCAR-level skills.)

Winnipeg is nothing like the futuristic city in which the Jetsons lived, wherein smiling cartoon characters could zip around safely in their flying bubble cars without ever experiencing “air rage” or slamming into the rear of another flying vehicle because they were mindlessly chatting on their video phone.

Drivers in this winter city would insist on zooming around in their flying cars without bothering to first sweep off the massive cap of snow covering the transparent bubbles, which means they would be flying blind, which I’m guessing would be a serious safety issue.

I’m terrified of a future in which snow-covered flying vehicles would be plummeting from the skies like icicles from a roof, which isn’t covered by CAA.

Also, drivers would forget to unplug their block-heater cords before they took off, which would “exacerbate the geographic isolation of elites,” and I’m sure the police hand out tickets for stuff like that.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca