The Flying Cars Analogy

Through the last month during regular conversations, I brought up one particular topic with my friends, colleagues, neighbors, and even my 6 year old. Flying cars.

Growing up in the 90s, every other sci-fi toons and movies like Jetsons, Total Recall showed some sort of flying transportation as the future. Even outside movie-land, many people will show high confidence that flying cars is the natural progression of personal transportation in the future.?

But it's 2022, almost 50 years since we had those TV shows and movies, but flying cars are nowhere close to being a reality. I was curious to know what people's immediate thoughts on if and when it could become a reality.?

Off my wide range of conversations and followup discussions, I can compress the comments I got into:

1. Reference to existing technological 'miracles' : "No one thought those small picture phones we saw in movies will ever become reality. But here we are today with smartphones. Similarly flying cars will also happen soon, it won't take much longer"
2. Skepticism : "The cost to keep vehicles in the air and the risk of midflight failure is too high for this to ever become a reality"
3. Taking the aspiration a lot further: "We should forget flying cars and work on inventing a teleportation machine to instantly go anywhere"
4. Related ideas: "We should develop cars with wings, which can glide like aeroplanes on air so wont take that much fuel to fly"
5. Alternate solutions: "Forget flying cars, we should build an intercontinental underground superhighway system for vehicles" followed by references to Elon Musk's Boring Company Tunnel in LA.
6. Justifying why we should pursue flying cars: "Flying cars can potentially achieve more efficiency than driving as per research by XYZ"
7. Open-ended Hopefulness: "Our ability as humans to innovate is very high and we will see this in our lifetimes."

What I observed is almost none of the initial comments from the people I talked to were about the basic questions:?

1. What technological advancements need to happen first, before a flying car is practical?
2. Assuming we build a car with flight capabilities, can we mass produce it and bring costs down and make it affordable for the average consumer?
3. Would these cars fit in existing garage dimensions? I imagine it would be a nightmare to park one of those gliding cars with 10 ft wings in Downtown.
4. How feasible it is for existing and new drivers to learn driving skills in 3 dimensions?
5. Safety and Reliability: A flying car malfunction or breaking down midway would mean a 3 ton metal box crashing down on whatever is below.
6. Whats the motivation for Auto companies and governments to incentivize building a flying car??
7. How many people would actually buy a flying car even if an affordable and reliable one existed?

When I brought up these points, almost everyone agreed in a short time that mass produced flying cars is just too impractical with even the most cutting edge available and upcoming technologies. It will probably never happen in our lifetimes due to the above reasons.

I read through at articles after articles about flying cars online and there have been countless attempts at building flying cars. None of them has made it beyond the prototype phase. Yet, what’s most remarkable about the idea of the flying car is how enduring it is.?Despite a history of failures, every generation of engineers and entrepreneurs have been, and still are, captivated by the idea. I think it's because these ambitious folks jump to that attractive end goal before assessing need, demand, feasibility, practicality and scale.

We work for great companies building awesome products. We build and refer to product roadmaps, backlogs, keep our customers excited on whats coming, do planning and estimates, and work hard to achieve those goals and work on the next roadmap. In this constant cycle of product development, I leave you with this question:

Can you identify potential flying cars in your product plans??

1. That Feature in the Backlog that keeps getting pushed back because too many unknowns.
2. That Feature that was added because the customer wanted something too early for your product.
3. That cool Feature from a competing product because 'if they have it we should too'.
4. That cool Feature that users don't need or don't care about right now.

.. and many such more.

Need, Demand, Feasibility, Practicality and Scale. Knowing this for everything we build in our products will save us years of effort in the long term.