• Question: when will we be able to have a flying car?

    Asked by antman to Sian, Dawn, David, Dan, Christie on 15 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      There are people working on it at the moment! I remember reading an article a couple of years about a group who had produced a prototype of a fully functioning flying car at the Vienna Technology Show.
      https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2014/oct/29/flying-car-prototype-unveiled-vienna-technology-show-video
      It looks more like a plane than a car, but can be driven too! If you mean in terms of hover cars, we’re many years away from that yet. They’ve made a version of a hover board but it either requires a lot of pumped air, which wouldn’t be practical, or very powerful magnets, which also wouldn’t be very practical!

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Driverless is coming – learned today that 4 US states have approved them. This needs to succeed to enable flying as the safety aspect is then less troublesome from a regulatory perspective, I think.

      I also learned today that statistically, we are due an accident with a driverless car any day. The numbers in testing mean that it should be a matter of not very much time now!

    • Photo: Dawn Lau

      Dawn Lau answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Honestly, I’m not sure. But thinking about all the new traffic regulations that we would have to put in place in order to accommodate flying cars is making my head hurt! How would you design traffic lights and paths for flying cars, how would they be regulated in order to ensure safety? It will take a lot of time to sort that out, even if the technology to produce a flying car is already available.

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