Flying Cars Are Here
I'm trying to think of situations in which flying a car at this remarkably low rate of speed would actually be convenient. It could help in standstill traffic on the interstate if you needed to skip a half-mile of road to get around an accident. It could help if you're a terrible parallel parker, and could just plop your car directly into a spot (although if you can't figure out how to parallel park, I'm not sure how confident I am in your ability to maneuver a flying vehicle). If it were remotely legal, you could do things like park your flying car on the roof of a building if the parking lot was full. That'd be pretty neat. And I guess sometimes there could be a situation where point A to point B is a half-mile as the crow flies, but there are no direct roads to get there, so you have to drive a few miles out of the way around a reservoir or a golf course to get to your destination. Also, if a bridge collapses on you and the rest of traffic goes plunging to their death, it would be a pretty cool flex to hit the "fly" button and not die.
Aside from that... it's cool that the car can fly and all... but that thing is traveling at the speed of Stephen Hawking's wheelchair. As sick as it would be to get caught in a police chase, and when the cops finally think they have you cornered your car lifts off into the air... I struggle to see how this particular version of a flying vehicle would be at all practical.
Honestly, even though it's stupid, $300k for the world's first (or one of the first) flying cars almost seems light. I think working at Barstool and watching the way Dave Portnoy bets and throws money into meme coins has skewed my perception of what "a lot" of money is. When I see a flying car, I immediately think the price tag is going to be at least a million. But $300k? That's a Tuesday night Big East game in January. I can't help but think to myself, "Damn... if Dave just laid off the DePaul +16.5 tonight, he could be flying floating around South Beach next week."
If we're being honest... the car really does look like shit. It looks fake. It looks light enough to squat. I'm sure that's a bit of an optical illusion, but the car in general looks downright goofy.
I'm sure these things aren't anywhere close to street legal yet. At least not to fly. But I bet they will be the minute Tesla figures it out and puts one on the market. Once we get these things up to an acceptable speed, we'll have cars flying around New York City like The Jetson's. I can't help but think about the first ever head-on mid-air car crash. Imagine minding your own business, driving groundedly on your commute home from work, and a flying Tesla Model Z lands on top of you. The good news is if you manage to survive the crash, you'll be set for life financially. Or if you die, at least your family will be. Best case scenario, your dad is a huge fucking asshole who you wish was dead and the car lands on him and you make millions of dollars in a lawsuit and retire at age 36. Sorry, sorry, that's a little dark. Just trying to look on the bright side of this completely fictional made up scenario that will almost certainly never happen in any of our lifetimes. My point is, flying car technology is there (kinda). Maybe there's actually a chance we see these things put to use in the real world some day.
In many ways it's kind of strange to me that we don't have flying cars yet. I bet 100 years ago, if you asked people what they thought the future would be like, flying cars would probably be one of the first things they said. Nobody could have conceived things like the internet or artificial intelligence. But flying cars, jet packs, robot butlers, basically anything you saw on the Jetsons, those ideas have been around for ages. Those are the things everyone thought we'd have by now. If you told my grandpa when he was a kid that in 2025, this is the best flying car we'd have to offer, he'd have thought we've accomplished nothing in the way of innovation as a society. He'd be embarrassed for us. Honestly, he might be right. Now that I mention it, we really should have flying cars by now. And I should 1000% be able to take a reasonably priced jet pack to work. But instead, our brightest minds are focusing their attention on perfecting A.I. technology that will almost certainly kill us all one day. Fucking idiots… The Jetsons had it right. We should have been sticking to The Jetsons script this whole time. Now all we have this pathetic, slow-ass floating car, and artificial intelligence that's actively plotting world domination in a language we can't even understand. Good work assholes.