[examancer]

Flying cars. I remember seeing prototypes in late 80s and early 90s, constantly showing up on Discovery Channel programs I watched as a kid like Beyond 2000 or Next Step.

Over time it seemed increasingly far out, but, possible. Eventually I realized things like how catastrophic a break down or accident would be meant it will likely never happen. I and everyone else who thought flying cars were on the horizon were suckers.

[anon1253]

We have helicopters though, even quadcopters that can carry people, not to mention airplanes. But general purpose "flying cars" are a ridiculous idea: the failure mode is catastrophic (as you pointed out), the noise will be terrible (especially in cities), not to mention pollution (you might not care about CO2, but breathable air is still nice). And there's regulation, since there are no roads you need centralized control (e.g commercial/military flight control systems) which makes it almost impossible to scale and would mean sacrificing to great extend the benefits of cars: autonomy. And above that it solves a weird problem: congestion and capacity, but those are better tackled with self-driving cars and better public transit.

[swyx]

same here. It took me an embarrassingly long time to come around to Elon's view that we need to go down, not up.