Haunted by grandpa's dusty flying car
Haunted by grandpa's dusty flying car
Undead visions of the future are lurking our dreams - what should we do about them?
In February 2024 at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress, once again flying cars were announced to be just around the corner. Alev Aeronautics' CTO stated its flying car will be as cool as "something from Science Fiction”.1
Indeed the Alef prototype looks quite a bit like the 1954 Ford FX Atmos concept car2 and could have been taken straight from a movie my grandparents might have watched in their youth. Back then the Marshall plan, Cold War related R&D and exponential fossile fuel consumption summoned visionary energies that had to be channeled somewhere. This is how the Space Age discovered its Terra Nullis in the sky and this is why my grandfather studied aviation engineering. He would have been fascinated by flying cars.
Many wonder why we did not yet succeed in bringing flying cars to the mainstream. Critics from left and right think this is due to a loss of innovative drive caused by growing bureaucracy.3 I wonder: why are we obsessed with "solving" flying cars over decades?
Inquiring aviation experts on the topic yields substantial challenges with the problem to be solved.4 For example:
Making flying cars ubiquitous will create huge safety concerns. I once read a portrait about a family that got their livingroom demolished twice by drunk drivers not making the sharp turn outside their house. This could be everybody when flying cars would populate residential areas.
We know the weather gets more unstable due to climate change. Airborne commuting would increase the risk associated with spontaneous storms, hail and all the other things we see more frequently, especially in low altitudes.
Considering the trade-off between overhead, travel speed and cost, flying cars can occupy only a niche between roadbound cars with low overhead, speed and cost vs. small airplanes with high overhead, speed and cost. And this niche happens to be taken already by helicopters.
There might be systems to predict the weather, or StarTrek shield technology to protect flats against intercepting aerial vehicles. But complexity makes things fragile and fragility makes things unviable. Instead of revisiting the problems flying cars are supposed to solve, we are obsessed with a fancy solution no matter the cost - a mindset we may call Solutionism5.
In Writing I sometimes use wrong words because they sound similar to words I intended to use. In a similar fashion, it is no coincidence that flying car concepts in 2024 look like concept cars from the 1950s. As it is no coincidence, that Donald Trump is betting on flying cars to make american technology great again6. The vision of "flying cars" is haunting us, because it rhymes so well with a nostalgia for the technological optimism we lost with our grandparents.
To get rid of unviable futures haunting our dreams, we need to question the problems we want to fix. Nobody needs flying cars, but what we need is technology adressing the big issues of our time. In his late days my grandfather told me, he would not be studying aviation engineering again but something more important, like energy technology.
Instead of being promised flying cars, I want to be promised cold fusion power plants, an existing rain forrest and AI-voice-translation for my dog, please.
The Alef Aeronautics flying car prototype was presented at 2024 Barcelona Mobile World Congress.↩︎
The Ford FX Atmos is a nuclear powered concept car from 1954..↩︎
Peter Thiel has been crying about not getting flying cars on several occasions. David Graeber has pointed out that technological innovation is increasingly beeing stiffled by bureaucratic managers and technologies simulating progress instead of realizing it.
Breakdown of key issues with flying cars by pilot & editor of Air Facts Journal John Zimmerman
The term Solutionism was coined by Evgeny Morozov, describing it as “an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are ‘solvable’ with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal”. See The Perils of Perfection, Evgeny Morozov in New York Times from 2019 or an essay on Solutionism & Design written by me for the printed edition of FORM 283 “The Power of Design”, 2019
Donald Trumps 2024 presidential campaign celebrates Flying Cars as a cornerstone of its technological vision.