Plain English with Derek Thompson - Are Flying Cars Finally Here?

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

For decades, flying cars have been a symbol of collective disappointment—of a technologically splendid future that was promised but never delivered. Whose fault is that? Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has spent 18 months researching the history, present, and future of flying car technology, joins the show. We talk about why flying cars don't exist—and why they might be much closer to reality than most people think. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail].  Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Gideon Lewis-Kraus Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sure, the weather is getting warmer and you're probably planning your next vacation with your family, but what better way to avoid your family on that vacation than listening to three dudes argue about quarterback tears, if you can trust a wide receiver over 30 years old, and if Jim Harbaugh still thinks chickens are nervous birds. Join me, Craig Horlebeck, along with Danny Hyfitts and Danny Kelly every week on the Ringer Fantasy Football Show. I want to begin this episode with a quote. A secret question hovers over us. a sense of disappointment. A broken promise we were given as children

about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I'm referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given, about how the world is fair or how those who work hard shall be rewarded, but to a particular generational promise, given to those who were children in the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s, one that was never quite articulated as a promise, but rather as a set of a set of a set

about what our adult world would be like. Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, anti-gravity sleds, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid to late 20th century assumed would exist by now? What happened to them? End quote.

That is the lead of one of my favorite weirdo essays from the previous decade, the late academic David Graber writing in 2012 in the magazine The Baffler. In an article that asks a question that's been asked many times by people in the tech space and just around the world, what happened to the flying car? Why are flying cars like the dip in dots of transportation technology? Always the ice cream of the future, never the ice cream of the present. Is it a technology failure? A regulatory failure?

A human failure? Or something else? Sometimes this question is used as a kind of synecdoche, a specific question that stands for a much bigger question. When people say, where's my flying car? What they're really asking in many cases is what happened to progress in the physical world. Why does it seem like physical world progress has slowed down in the last few decades? Look around if you're outside or look through your window if you're indoors.

Everything you can see. cars, trucks, paved roads, electric wires, all of this was invented more than 100 years ago. Most of the inventive sprint of the last few decades has been funneled into the digital realm, into smaller and more powerful bits, rather than into the world of atoms, which would make flying cars a reality.

But as today's guest points out, this line of thinking sometimes overlooks the progress that actually exists. Imagine going back 100 years ago, the 1920s, when civilian planes were small, dangerous, They crashed all the time. Maybe someone comes along, a madman. And he says, I want to change this industry. I want to build a plane for 200 people.

It's going to weigh a quarter of a million pounds on takeoff. It's going to carry 200,000 pounds of highly flammable fuel, and we're going to fly it all over our biggest cities. And I want to put a thousand of these things in the air at once, even though they could crash into each other and actually make this mode of transportation safer than walking down the street on a per mile basis. That would sound insane.

But it's the world we live in, because I just described to you the basic specs of a Boeing 787. In other words, we should be just as curious about the progress denied us in flying cars as we are inspired

by the progress that we have in aviation. Today, to help us see this big picture, clearly, we have Gideon-Louis Cross, a staff writer at the New Yorker. We talk about the long history of flying car technology, the many starts and stops and starts and stops, the barriers to making so-called V-toles or vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and what it would finally require to achieve that dream of mid-century dreamers and make flying cars a fixed reality in our transportation infrastructure. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Gideon Lewis Krause, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having you, Derek. We're about to get into the technicalities of flying cars, the physics of flying cars, the regulations, the experience, the history of flying cars. I want to start by asking you about the idea of the flying car. I feel like in Silicon Valley, in the broader tech and progress world, the flying car is served as a kind of symbol of disappointment. Like, where's my flying car? is asking both a literal question,

like where's my sedan with wings, but also maybe even more importantly, a metaphorical question, something like why has innovation in the physical world not matched innovation in the digital space? Why do you think the flying car

has this sort of symbolic power to represent such huge ideas about technology and progress? Well, I mean, part of it, you know, if you want to be a little bit cynical about it, it's about a lot of these boomers like Mark Andreessen sitting around watching the Jetsons when they were little kids. And like, how could that not capture your imagination? Like zooming around to, you know, being sent off to school in a tiny little pod.

But also, like, this was in so much of that mid-century sci-fi, like this idea that, of course, we are going to be getting around by flying cars. It was just like completely obvious. And, you know, one thing that's interesting about that whole discourse is that so many of these other predictions at the time, like we're going to get plastics or we're going to have, you know, pocket-sized handheld radios. Like, these did come true. And so, you know, a lot of the stuff is not particularly far-fetched. And flying cars just seemed like a natural extension of what the, you know, world of abundance of the future was going to be like.

The paradox of the flying car is that it's broadly assumed that flying cars do not exist. And today it seems like a futuristic technology. But the history of the flying car, as you write, is really about 100 years old. So take me back a hundred years to the beginning of the invention of things that we can sort of kind of call flying cars. Tell me about Wanda La Siava and Waldo Waterman. Well, I mean, I think one of the things that we have to do is we sort of have to put flying cars in quotes here the whole time because we're talking about a lot of different flying contraptions that like may or may not be adjacent to what we think of as cars. So really, like, the category itself is pretty vaporous. So especially when you go back about 100 years, you know, this is still really the dawn of aviation.

I mean, like, people are starting to work on this stuff with, you know, in living memory of the Wright brothers. This is two and a half decades after the first flight. So flight in and of itself is still already being figured out. And frankly, cars are still being figured out. I mean, this is like the dawn of the mass car era. So I think both fields were kind of nascent and both fields were experimental. And also, you know, one of the things that, of course, by the time we get to the Jetsons, when we're talking, when we're thinking about flying cars, we already imagine contemporary jetliners.

But back then, like there wasn't any like obvious thing to be comparing these things to. So even the idea of a flying car didn't exactly make sense because we were kind of still figuring out what a car was and figuring out what a flying machine was. So, but back, but, you know, there's a whole long kind of forgotten history of what you would call essentially, like, ingenious flying contraptions that like kind of worked and kind of didn't work. And they were cool experiments. You know, there was this Spanish aeronautical genius called Juan de la Sierva invented in the 30s invented something called the auto gyro, which kind of looks like a low rent helicopter. But it was, I mean, it functioned on perfectly sound. principles and largely led later to the development of the helicopter, which had kind of got taken over by the military once the warrior started. And then there were other things. You know, there's an inventor called Waldo Waterman had something called the Aeromobile, which was a flying car. And then later there were examples where, you know, you had a

roadable vehicle that then you could buy as a regular car and you could drive it to the airport and you could get outfitted with wings, and then you could take off and fly to another airport and land and drive away. So there was, I mean, I guess one could say that the line, in a sense, between cars and airplanes was a little bit blurrier than, as this was all getting figured out.

So the 1920s and 1930s, they're still trying to figure out flying. They're still trying to figure out cars. They're making things that are like flying cars, but maybe neither of them. Let's move up to the 1950s, where you write that it was almost a given for people living through this decade, that future sedans would come with wings.

Summarized for me, what's the state of, let's call it, individualized flying vehicular development in the 1950s? What's going on in this decade? Well, so some of this is inseparable from just the rise of what's called general aviation, which is just, you know, dudes flying or people flying little planes around. And general aviation had a real boom time after the war, because you had veterans coming back from the war with pilot training, you had a radically high percentage of American men, especially who had pilots licenses.

And so much of the aviation technology from the war found its way into commercial aviation, general aviation. And so I came across this great ad from the 50s that Cessna used to run advertising what they called their family car of the air, which was a little airplane, kind of the size of a Cessna 172 that somebody might recognize that they advertise. you could keep it in your garage, and it was just going to make life so much easier. And the ad copy was terrific. It's about how, like, you know, the miss is when she goes shopping, she's going to travel 600 miles in a day, and she's going to fly. And, you know, part of the understanding here was that flight in and of itself wasn't that hard to learn. And this was also in a time where, like, you know, America had just gotten used to the idea that, you know,

initially people thought like cars were going to be a possible to drive, and then everybody kind of figured out how to drive a car. And then by the 50s, there was an idea that like, yeah, you know, it wasn't crazy to think that lots of people could have pilot training. Now, of course, one of the provisos there is it's relatively easy to learn how to fly a little plane in, you know, beautiful, windless, sunny conditions. But, you know, that's not going to cover all of your use cases unless you live in, you know, Palm Desert or something like that.

Just really quickly, before we continue this story through the 1970s, what did you understand to be the popular distinction between a personal airplane, Cessna in the 1950s, and that which inventors, technologists were calling a flying car? I assume it had something to do with the fact that if you're talking about a flying car or a flying individual vehicle, you don't need an airport. You don't need necessarily a runway. But clearly for a small individual plane, that's the first thing that you need, both to take off and to land. So is that the major distinction?

Or is there another distinction for people to think about when sort of putting Cessna's and this sort of pipeline of flying car development in a separate bucket? Well, I mean, I think that the salient distinction is between any form of multimodal transportation, where you're going to have to get yourself to an airport with one conveyance and then got on a different conveyance and then land in a different. conveyance versus just point to point. I mean, like, that's really what we're talking about. So even when people said, you know, there was some reaction with with the story that I wrote where people were like, well, those aren't really cars, right? And I said, well, sure, no, they're not really cars. But if you go back and you even look at the Jetson's intro, like what George Jetson had, which has become like, you know, the most like symbolically visible, like form of the fine car. Like, that wasn't a car either. You don't see any roads in that. Like, that was just

a point to point. So the idea really is point to point. And that, You know, although one of the ironies here is that America has, you know, like a truly staggering number of airstrips, like 15,000 air strips or something like that. So it's not, it wasn't that crazy to think like you would be able to drive to your local airstrip and then take off. And this was just like one degree of greater convenience that you didn't have to get yourself to the airstrip and get in a plane that you would just take off from your driveway. But of course, that required a, you know, completely different vision of flight because

you needed to be able to take off vertically and without a runway. And that changes, you know, because of the nature of flight, the mechanics of flight, that kind of changes everything, the difference between having a runway and not. So no matter how we define these vehicles, clearly something has happened to the dream of flying cars. And this is a failed dream or a dream deferred that practically every famous technologist has rude in some way or the other. Peter Thiel most famously has said, we wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters. A few years ago, there was a technologist named Jay Stores Hall who published a manifesto called Where's My Flying Car? And he took that question extremely literally.

He tried to answer, why is it that we thought in the 1940s, 1950s, that flying cars would be a part of our future in the 2020s, but they do not exist, really in anything like the way we thought they do it? His case was that as a society, we lost our taste for risk and ambition, that the development of the flying car was essentially strangled in the crib by regulation. In 1973, the FAA banned the supersonic concord from flying over the U.S. It became impossible to build nuclear reactors. He told you American society allows about 40,000 road fatalities a year, but refuses to tolerate even one aviation death. He thinks that the rules are set up to strangle innovation in this space.

I wonder how you feel this argument sits with you, that the most important reason we don't have a mass flying personal vehicle industry today is because our regulatory system made their development impossible. Okay, so to answer that, I think I'm going to take a little bit of a step back and say that, you know, to me, my interest in at least some of this stuff is that it's so easy to blame regulation kind of two core as a bug bear. for whatever one's, you know, favorite problems are. And so, you know, for Peter Thiel, who would come in and say, like, you know, why don't we have flying cars? Why don't we have, you know, immortality drugs? It's all regulation. And, you know, obviously, if you know anything about regulation, if you have any kind of domain expertise in regulation, you know, that there's no such thing as just regulation. There are lots of different kinds of regulation, practiced by different agencies with different intent.

And that it's, you know, it's one of these concepts where you start to press on it and, like, the whole idea. of regulation per se kind of starts to fall apart. And in this particular case, you know, the J-Store's Hall book is a really great kind of wacky book that like the first maybe 200 pages are really about flying cars and about the history of flying cars. And he taught himself how to fly for that book. But then it turns out, you know, often when somebody, you know, has a hobby horse like this, it turns out there's something else kind of lurking behind it. And in his case, the argument is like essentially we're afraid of energy. And he coins this term for like ergophobia. And he says that, like, you know, we, like, we have this attitude that, you know, starting in the 60s, we got afraid of technology because we were afraid of using energy, we being obsessed with degrowth, with, you know, we were going to be punished for our Promethean hubris and that there was this, like, retreat from energy per se. And, like, that's what he seems to really care about. And, like, the flying part, he says, essentially, like, if we hadn't been so afraid of energy, then we wouldn't have, you know, we would have different regulations about planes and we would have flying cars now.

And for Peter Thiel, it seems like his, you know, one of his big concerns has to do with, like, you know, biotech innovation. And for him, like, it's part of this old story about how, like, the FDA is killing people, sending people to the invisible graveyard because of type two errors because they move so slowly. And, like, that's another story where you kind of push on it. Like, it sort of sounds good in theory that, like, the FDA is, like, moving the bunch of bureaucrats moving so slowly, keeping our drugs locked up. But, like, again, you spend two minutes looking into that and just, like, empirically, that's just, like, not an accurate story about pharmaceutical regulation in this country, especially over the last 30 years.

And so to me, I thought, like, okay, well, why don't we, instead of, there's story we hear about how, like, regulation has caused this technological stagnation. So instead of trying to take that head on and try to assess, like, what's essentially, like, a huge thesis that would be probably unfalsifiable, like, can we take one example and say, like,

okay, can we determine that the fate of flying cars was due to regulation in this particular case? Like, let's look at what actually happened here. And, you know, certainly regulation is one small part of it. I mean, the FAA is slow moving and cautious and that there are examples of people trying to get something like a flying car certified in the 70s and being sandbagged by the FAA. But that's only one small part of a very different story. And that, like, essentially, the broadest and I think like kind of most generous understanding of this is really just

that commercial aviation kind of out-competed individual general aviation and that it just got I mean for a lot of different reasons there was tort reform that changed liability issues for little planes and that like really it's a matter of like well actually commercial aviation

in the 50s seemed still kind of dicey and like planes crashed a lot and it was incredibly expensive. I mean, you see these memes on the internet of somebody, you know, having like a prime rib carved for them on an airplane. And like they missed the fact that those tickets cost $6,000 or whatever in today's money. So, you know, in between the 60s and the 80s, air travel just got way cheaper, way safer, way more reliable, way more available to, you know, people of modest means.

And like, so you had the option then of, okay, am I going to like own and pay for my own little airplane or flying car or whatever? Or am I just going to get myself to the airport and like take a commercial flight and really just commercial flight got so good that it kind of beat out this like home, you know, home brew point to point alternatives? When people say that progress in aviation has almost stopped because we do not have flying cars and we don't have supersonic jets, personally, I think they make a very important. very important point. I am probably a little bit more baseline critical of physical world regulation than it sounds like you are. But I also think it's the case that you have to look at the fact that flying is so much cheaper than it was the 1960s and 1970s if you adjust for inflation. And also, to your point, whereas 50 years ago, planes went down all the time. The last fatal crash of a domestic commercial jetliner happened in 2009.

So we've now gone 15, 16 years without a fatal crash of a domestic commercial jetliner. And that's a miracle. I think it's also really important to say, though, that something significant has happened in the last 10 years, 20 years in the technology for takeoff and landing vehicles. As you write, we've seen a flurry of investments in flying personal vehicle technology. And you could not have written this story in 2014. You did write this story in 2024. take us through the technological changes that have happened in the last 10, 15 years or so.

What's changed on the technology and business side that's most important? Well, so, you know, going back to the point you were raising about, like, what does innovation look like? I mean, you know, the guy who said, yeah, if you're a four-year-old and you hold a picture of a 707 and a, you know, 787, they look the same, but, like, inside they're completely different. You know, one of the points he made is, you know, not only are they safer, but they're like 80% more fuel efficient. And so if your concern, you know, if your concern is, okay, we have, you know, we've become afraid of energy, then like, sure, that looks like kind of a degrowth move. That like, okay, we're just getting the same output out of less input. But, you know, the other thing that has happened along the way is that this stress on efficiency and on sustainability has led to

a radical improvement in battery technologies and in distributed electrical propulsion, which is electric motors that are strong enough to get something in the air and keep something in the air. And even it, like that, those technologies just took a really long time to mature. But what they did ultimately, and this to me is what's so interesting is that something that initially was designed to be more energy efficient, which is like, let's find a way to electrify this, this, you know, this whole sphere because it's like really expensive and heavy and dangerous to be carrying around 100,000 pounds of jet fuel all the time, that like, even if

initially that was done out of a motive for efficiency, in the end, actually, that got us a very, very different kind of flight. Because starting, you know, with electric vehicle research, you know, about 20 years ago, and with drone research that was developed around the same time and for electrical propulsion research, all of a sudden, about 15 years ago, all of these things get so good that a lot of people in a lot of different places notice and they think like, okay, look at these remote control airplanes. Like not only can they like, you know, can they fly for a long time, but also like they have such fidelity of control because they are electric, because you're not dealing with huge mechanical systems that are going to have like some error that,

like, oh, maybe these are so precise and they've dealt with the energy management problems of flight, maybe we could put a person into one of those. And this occurs to a lot of people right around the same time in 2008, 2008, 2009, 2010. And then you get this like profusion of attempts to take these technologies that would develop for other reasons and put them toward crude flight. And like then you get like you have, you have backyard inventors, you have billionaire, and then ultimately you also have the big aerospace companies who start investing in this stuff. Because the technology was just there in a new way. Plus, you know, these things made it a lot easier for people to fly because they're much,

much easier to control and they're safer and you can have greater redundancy. And also, you know, you don't have the same issues with maintenance and with where, you know, if you don't have a jet engine dealing with, you know, getting to thousands of, of degrees that are going to give you a lot of wear instead of you have a little electrical motor. So all of these things start to come together and people realize like, okay, there's a way that we're going to be able to take off, stay in the air, and fly with precision. It's interesting because if you think about the question that I posed earlier, why don't we have, quote, flying cars today? Answer number one, you could file under the category of it's a regulation problem. We regulated

this technology out of existence. You are submitting, I think, what we can think of as answer number two, which is it's a technology problem. It took a while for technologists to develop the guts of the flying car. Batteries had to become better and lighter. Electro propulsion systems had to get better. You needed sensors. You needed autonomous capabilities. You needed the benefits of drone research. You needed all of this work to be done to lay the foundation for a quote unquote flying car revolution. Let's talk about that revolution as it's happening right now. Your report about on several companies that are trying to develop, quote, electric flying aircraft. Let's start with Pivotal, which is founded by a Canadian inventor named Marcus Lang and is now run by Ken Kirkland. What is Pivotal trying to do?

So Pivotal again comes out of this era of great, you know, visionary fecundity about 15 years ago where this inventor figures out, like, I'm going to build something in my basement that I'm going to be able to fly with. And in 2009, you know, in his rural property north of Lake Ontario, he invites a bunch of friends over and he tells them to hide behind their cars. And first, he's a couple kind of fits and starts as he's adjusting the inputs. And then he takes off and he goes into this screaming turn and like curls a huge divot out of his lawn and lands in front of his friends. And there is, as far as anyone knows, like the first manned electrical vertical take off in the annex flight. And then eventually he moves the company to Silicon Valley.

He takes an investment from Larry Page, and this company was in stealth mode for almost 10 years, I think until 2018, as they're refining this. And he told me the original version had no redundancies, that this was like a fundamentally unsafe aircraft. So then you have to figure out how do you do triple redundancy for everything. How do you make sure you get to this like Six Sigma safety level that like the FAA would require? And finally, in the last couple of years, they started to make this, or in the last year, really, they started to make this available to customers.

It costs, they have two models. It costs around 200 grand, kind of depending on the trim package you get. And the major stipulation is, you don't actually need any pilot training to fly this, because it exists under this carve-out and FAA regulations called Part 103, which allows for the existence of something called an ultralate, which is essentially just there.

concession to the reality that like, you know, if you, Derek wanted to tie a lawnmower engine to a kite and fly around your backyard, like, I'm sure your wife would not be crazy about it, but like the government's not going to stop you from doing it as long as you're only endangering yourself. And so this, like there's no technically no training required, but they also are very well aware that like anybody who dies in one of these things like probably brings the company down with them. So they, when you buy one, you have to head out to their headquarters in on the east side of Palo Alto, and they give you like a two-week bespoke flight training class in their simulator. And you did this? You flew in one? Well, so, I mean, the whole thing happened

very, the whole thing happened so quickly that I kind of like couldn't really clock what was going on, which is that I somebody, you know, I ended up reporting this piece on and off over a period of about a year and a half because a lot of this stuff happens very, very slowly for, you know, the regulatory reasons we've been discussing. So there was one company. that was going to be doing some tests in New Zealand, and they thought it was going to be happening about a year and a half ago. And then, you know, New Zealand regulatory agencies are very forward-looking and very agile and very happy to foster a climate of aerospace innovation there.

But even then, it took them a year and a half to set up these tests. So I had sort of started reporting this, and then it was just like sitting in my hand, you know, doing other stories in the meantime. And then even and only that you kind of year and a half that I was waiting around for more stuff to happen, all of a sudden, like that, like, there was a big change in this industry and these things were commercially available to actual customers. And so an investor in the space had said like, look, you know, what you really need for the story is to go fly one of these things. And I thought, yeah, right, like, that's not going to

happen. And he said, like, there's this company and I think it'll work out for you. And so I call, I get in touch with this PR woman at Pivotal and she says, you know, like, and I sort of said, well, you know, I heard there's a chance. Like, maybe I could fly this. I don't know. And I expected her to say, like, don't be ridiculous. Of course you can not fly this. And she was like, yep, come on out. Like, we can have you in two weeks. You know, we're going to be at CES. You can't come all over. And then you can come out. And we'll train you in four days. And then if we think that you're ready, we'll let you up there.

The PR lady hangs up. And then she calls me back. She says, wait, actually, I have a couple questions. Number one, are you over 200 pounds? Because there's a limit here. And you can't be over 200 pounds or greater than, or taller than 6'4. And then she says, you know, are you a gamer? And I was like, well, I don't know. when I was in high school, I used to play a lot of golden eye, but I haven't really been a gamer since then. She was like, well, we're asking because, like, we find that gamers tend to pick it up much more quickly than other people.

And then she was like, well, even if you're not a gamer, like, you'll, you'll probably be okay. And I like walk out of this conversation and I say to my wife, like, I think I might be able to go fly this flying car in two weeks. And my wife was like, yeah, right, whatever. Of course, that's not going to happen. And I didn't really think it was going to happen. I mean, like, it didn't seem plausible. And then, sure enough, like, I go out to California a couple weeks later. and they give me a brief tour of their facilities,

and then they say, okay, here's the simulator room. Like, now you just train for the next four days. And at the end of your last day, we're going to test you. And if we think that, you know, you're going to not kill yourself and kill our company, like we're going to let you up there. So what is flying in a blackfly actually like? So, you know, the problem of flight is how you need lift to get up in the air and you need thrust to move forward.

And so there are a lot of different ideas when you're taking off in one of these EV-talls, one of these vertical take-off and landing vehicles about how you have an initial lift phase that transitions to a thrust phase. And the way the Blackfly does it is the entire vehicle kind of rears back, and then it kind of takes off like a rocket ship. And then when you get to around 40 feet, you start to level back off so that into like a form of wing-borne flight. And so the simulator chair doesn't tilt on the other end. axes because that would be expensive, but it tilts on this one major axis because you have to get used to that feeling of pitching back almost 90 degrees and then pitching forward.

And, you know, at first, my flight instructor said, like, well, just to like give you some fun with this to see how it feels, like, we're going to just like take off in Central Park and you can fly over New York and you can fly to your house. And so I did that. It was really fun, although, of course, I had like some VR sickness. And then he said, okay, like now we really just have an actual curriculum to cover, which is like how to go through the checklist and properly take off and handle it in the air and land. And all of these things were relatively intuitive. I mean, it really is just like a little view screen in front of you and your joystick. And it's not hard to figure out the controls. I mean, you don't have to be like a world-class

gamer to do it, it turns out. But what is hard is, you know, there's like a considerable cognitive load to doing this. And like, that's what's challenging about about, about in general is that even if you can do it all on the ground, it's very different when you're like hanging in the air and, you know, like, it's not like a car where you get scared. You can just pull over the side of the road. There's no such thing as pulling over the side of the road. And you have a problem, you know, as I say, like this thing has the glide ratio of a dishwasher. Well, it also seems like something like, something as simple as checking the battery or checking the equivalent of the gas gauge, right? Like if I see, if I'm driving, you know, from Washington,

D.C. to New York and I realize somewhere in. in New Jersey that I'm running out of gas because the lights on, I don't have like a full-blown panic attack. I'm just like, okay, I'm going to take the next exit wherever I see a shell sign. But that's because the cost of the car running a little bit low on batteries isn't me falling a hundred feet out of the sky and killing someone by crashing into their bedroom. So like, that seems like the cognitive load that I would experience is like constantly looking at these different things that are indicative of, am I about to die or are things more or less on a so-called glide path? Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

And that also feeds back into this regulation question because it's one thing to say, we're going to iterate and kind of figure things out as we go along if you're just on the ground. But the whole nature of the cost-benefit calculation changes when a little screw-up means you plummet out of the sky. So it's reasonable that this industry has been pretty cautious about this because they just don't want that happening.

And because one of the stories historically about flying cars is that a bunch of these did crash. And even if people didn't die, like the second something crashes, the publicity is bad enough that people are like, well, I'm not going to get into that thing. So let me just ask an obvious question here. Was it awesome? I mean, you were flying in a flying car. No, I mean, so the first time that when they clear me to fly, I thought like, oh, my God, this is real. And I woke up that morning and I was terrified and I had to drive about 40 miles east of the Bay Area to this air strip with this uncontrolled air strip they use.

and like all of a sudden like there it was and I was going to be flying it and the first flight was just like a simple hover like go up come down like just get used to it but it was very very I mean even if the controls are the same as the simulator it's very different to feel yourself like you know feel the G forces and feel yourself launched up and pinned back and it also is like pretty loud it feels like you're you know a lawnmower roar so it kind of just like hovered up like peaked out the windows like looked at the you know Mount Diablo in the distance and then like came back down with my heart pounding.

And then the second one was like a little box pattern where I would kind of go up, forward, back around like in a little box. And that was fine, although I kind of slightly missed the landing pad on the way down, like skid it off the landing pad. And then they were like, okay, now you're ready. Like now it's your turn for a real flight. And that was

like I take off and vertically in the hover and then I kind of yaw around to avoid the people below because they were like, you know, there's some boundary fences that you can't cross because it's unsafe. And then finally, then I level off and I'm like really flying and, you know, they're like the beautiful green California hills and the windmills and the like there, I can see the little cows grazing below. I mean, it was like utterly intoxicating. It was incredible.

On the business, this machine, Blackfly by Pivotal, cannot be flown in controlled airspace, you right. It can't be flown near an airport or above a certain altitude. You cannot fly it over congested areas. You cannot employ it in commercial activities, so you can't use it as a kind of sky Uber, I suppose. It can't be flown in a strong wind, and it cannot be flown in light drizzle. What is this thing for? So, I mean, this is the thing is that when I was going into the whole thing, I was like, this is silly, right? You know, like, this is a cool toy for people who have a ranch. But like, and then, you know, when I was, when I sat down with the CEO, he was pretty honest in a very refreshing

way, actually, where he was like, yeah, you know, like, people say this is a toy for rich people, but, like, chariots were a toy for rich people. And, like, I don't know if that's true, but it sounds good. And he was like, you know, we're just like the cutting edge of this here. And, like, who knows, down the line, like, maybe rich people are the first adopters, but then this really, like, as people get habituated to weird stuff in the sky, like, maybe this expands. And it's not that crazy expensive. I mean, like, it's not any more expensive than a fancy sports car. And, you know, they said so, but, but. I pushed them on use cases.

And they were like, well, you know, like if you have a vineyard, you might want to survey your vineyard from above. And I was like, okay. And they were like, we have another, I was like, if I ever get a vineyard, I will definitely survey my vineyard with one of these. And then, you know, they actually did have one customer in the Central Valley somewhere who wanted to commute to work. And they had like, you know, using Google Maps,

figure it out a flight plan for him that would go over like public easements or whatever so that he wouldn't endanger people on the ground. He was going to fly about 12 miles to work and back every day. Then they had another, like, they called them a superfan, a father and daughter, a couple that, like, they were going to travel across the entire country 20 minutes at a time, which eventually they were discouraged from doing. But they're not a ton of use cases.

It's also not the only company in this space. And there are other companies that are looking at different use cases. So we think of this as category A, which is the pivotal blackfly, mostly to be used for recreation, short flights, surveying some farmland, flying over a ridge to see your neighbors somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Another use case that some people are working on

is the air taxi. Tell me about WISC, the company WISC, and their proposition for EVTALs as air taxis. So this is probably where most of the money in the industry is going to are these air taxi models. And so it's WISC, which kind of emerged from a bunch of different kind of a distributed like R&D, skunk works that Larry Page had set up in like 2010, a bunch of different companies. WISC was kind of the winner of these companies. And now it's a subsidiary of Boeing.

But then there's another company called Joby and a company called Archer. And then there's a Chinese company which actually just got like a production certification. This seems to be like what's almost certainly like the first use case that's going to be, you know, widely available. to people, which, you know, they'll be, it's essentially just like an electric helicopter that's the price of an Uber. And that like the model is you're going to like get up and you're going to walk a couple blocks to your local, what they call a vertiport, you know, you're going to wait a couple of minutes. You're going to get on this, you know, air taxi that's going to take off vertically, kind of like looks like a cross between a helicopter and an airplane, depending on which model.

And it's going to take you, you know, to JFK in seven minutes or 15 minutes or whatever. And I think ideally down the line, they're hoping that they can actually land you inside security. So that actually you really would save a lot of time. And, you know, there are already companies that, like, in theory have deals to start doing this over the next couple of years. And Dubai is interested in this kind of thing. And it almost certainly, I mean, within the next five to ten years, like, this is going to be a reality. The question is, is this going to be a reality for everyone? Is this just going to kind of replace helicopters where people are already taking helicopters? Like,

And there's a lot of regulatory murkiness. So one company was already planning on taking paying passengers at the Paris Olympics this summer. And now it seems like that's probably not going to happen. But there probably will be like demo flights at the L.A. Olympics in a couple of years. And then WISC has a deal for passenger service at the Brisbane Olympics in 2032. So like some form of this is for sure coming. But as a lot of people point out, like the urban use case is kind of the hardest use case. Because if you really want this to be like a form of transportation, it needs.

to be something that is always, that is like perfectly reliable and safe, which means it's going to take off in a thunderstorm. And that like, like, those are all like pretty tricky problems to solve. Plus, you have kind of a volume issue, which is like, how many of these can you get in the air? And we're going to have to relax, like, the FAA's minimum separation standards, which say that aircraft have to be a certain distance apart. And like, there's a lot of stuff that's going to happen for like the urban thing to really be a reality. But a lot of people said to me is that there's like a much more plausible. use case for, you know, rural cases where you could use this for medical transport or even for commuting, that you could have somebody kind of commute from the Central Valley, a drive

that now takes three hours in a 20-minute flight to, you know, some little airport somewhere. Like, that also seems like very likely to happen. On Whisk, you mentioned it's a little bit like a cross between Uber and a helicopter. helicopters are flown by pilots. Ubers are driven by drivers. Are these being driven by hired flyers, or are these going to be autonomous electric EV tools? So, I mean, this is the big discussion in the industry.

So Joby, which probably, Joby and Archer will be, like, one of the two will probably be the first market in the States, and they're going to have pilots. But Wiskly did the calculations and basically just like the business model kind of doesn't pencil out if you have a pilot because you got you got to pay the pilot. It means one less seat you can tell on each plane.

And also we already have a pilot shortage. So then there's a question of like, okay, imagine this at scale. Like where are you going to just drum up 50,000 new pilots? Like that's not easy to do. And you know, you can see an example of that in your countries like Indonesia, which have had like new budget airlines and all of a sudden they have to just like find 50,000 new pilot somewhere. It's, it's tough. So WISC has decided that they want to go to full autonomy right away, which, or like in one step instead of like starting with a pilot and then

taking the pilot out. Can you talk a little bit about the changes to both regulations and I suppose the word I'm grasping for is social norms that would be necessary to allow for these kind of air taxis to become a frequent part of the commuting landscape. I mean, we are talking here about the sky being dotted with dozens of, maybe eventually in this vision, hundreds of autonomous flying vehicles, wherein if there is any accident, it is utterly catastrophic and immediately front-page news

on every newspaper in America, not to mention, really horrible for the people that those machines fall on on the ground. I mean, are people going to eventually design a bunch of autonomous helicopter-like machines and then recognize that, like, actually, we should have probably just built an underground train if we wanted to move all of these people

really quickly from, say, Manhattan to JFK? I'm just trying to think of, like, in the optimistic case that flying cars succeed, it's a pretty dramatic change to the cityscape, right? To the feel of the skies and even the sound of the city. Right. I mean, so on some level, you can understand the appeal of this vision because you think, like, oh, you know, you, you know, maybe more than anyone know how hard it is to build infrastructure on the ground. So there's this idea that like, oh, well, we'll just get around the like regulatory gridlock that prevents us from building trains or enforcing congestion pricing or all the

things that have proven so difficult to do. Like, instead, we're just going to fly. Like, we're going to, like, circumvent all of those issues. But, I mean, that's clearly a bit of a fantasy. Because, first of all, you can say, like, yeah, as you just pointed out, like, people look at the sky now and they're like, oh, the sky's totally empty. Like, we should be using that sky because it's empty. But the minute that you start doing this, like, the sky's not empty anymore and your

problem just got considerably more difficult. And that, like, there are so many different, both, like, political, behavioral, technological, things that have to work out to make that a reality. I mean, like, the noise, for example, like even if it's a relatively low kind of like mosquito buzz, like nobody wants that overhead all the time. But at the same time,

there is, you know, like, there's some interesting counterfactuals here where one guy in the industry said to me, like, when I was putting the same kind of question to him, he said, well, okay, imagine this. Imagine that there's a world in which we only ever had, like, little planes. And now you sit, like, you have

a company come in and you're like, okay, I want to take a massive plane. I want to put 500 people on it. I want to carry a million gallons of highly flammable jet fuel. And guess what? I want to take off and land near our biggest cities. Everyone would be like, that's crazy. Like, you can't do that.

Whereas, like, of course, that's just commercial travel now. And so a lot of this is just a question of, like, you know, people aren't, especially when it comes to aviation. Like, people, like, have no sense for making kind of, like, rational, like, assessments of the situation. because we know that just like being in the air freaks us out so much, that it like short-circuit some of those calculations. And so that kind of like cuts in a lot of different ways where you could say,

like, so, you know, you could say, like, it's really just a matter of like what people are used to experiencing that seems safe and normal to them. I have all sorts of enthusiasms and skepticisms about this technology that are constantly smashing against each other. I think that the concept of flying cars is awesome, just inherently from a basic, fundamental jets and standpoint. I just think it's awesome. And then when I think about actually building

this out as a transportation infrastructure, I really struggle to make it make sense. I'm skeptical of aerial autonomy. I'm skeptical of the fact that we can trust people to fly a multi-hundred pound thing in the air when we can barely trust them to drive on the ground. But I do want to reserve a space here for a little bit of utopian thinking, a little bit of unreasonable optimism. You spent all this time talking to chief executives and technologists and inventors about their dreams of how this technology could change transportation or logistics. What's the most plausible vision of success to you? Like in 20 to 30 years down the line, describe to me what you think the most most plausible vision, the

most realistic vision of a successful, quote, flying car revolution looks like? So it is, I mean, I think I share your skepticism and enthusiasm in equal measure, and that's what made the story interesting for me to do. It is very hard to imagine like half a million people crossing the Hudson River every morning in a flying thing. Because at that point, you really do get into the realm of like, well, why didn't we just build, you know, improve New Jersey transit? But, I mean, so I guess I can answer this in a couple ways.

On the most practical level, it seems like probably in 20, 30 years. It's very, although there currently are some range issues that, like, most of these things, you know, first of all, they don't, they're not big enough to take too many passengers, and they, you know, maybe they have a max range of 150 or 200 miles. But, like, it definitely seems possible that you could have relatively close, inner city transit that's very cheap. So that maybe you could have like regular air taxis from like New York to Philadelphia

or New York to New Haven or Philadelphia to Baltimore or something like that at like a price range that's like maybe not quite Uber, but definitely cheaper than a flight, flying very regularly and like doing trips like these in 30 minutes. And like that actually like that right away changes a lot. Like if you could reliably get from Philly to New York in 30 minutes like with takeoffs all day, like that's a big change. So that seems very plausible to me.

But then there's also kind of this separate question of like, well, how constrained is our imagination for what's plausible? And if you look at like the like exponential curve of aviation over the last 120 years, like it's kind of hard to think like extrapolate forward that as like as people like to point out, okay, so it's only 60 years from the right blower's. to the Boeing 707, which, like, would have been unimaginable. And then, like, another thing somebody told me, which was amazing, I forget whether it was Orville or Wilbur, but one of the Wright brothers was still alive when we broke the sound

barrier in an area. Wow. Which, like, is also amazing. One of the things I actually really liked about everyone in this industry, and I should say, I think it's worth noting that, like, I really liked almost everybody that I met. Like, these people were, like, serious, like, almost all these people were pilots themselves who loved flying. These were not just like, you know, like, like engineers kind of in search of a problem to solve and, like, coming up with, like, some stupid app.

Like, this is kind of like the best of Silicon Valley. Like, like, people were, like, genuinely passionate about what they were doing and were, like, really, like, not worrying too much about, like, you know, you don't hear these kind of like Peter Thiel concerns among these people. Like, these people are too busy building these things. And, but they, one of the things I found so appealing, I mean, as a magazine writer, it was a little bit tough. But as a person, like, they just. really, like, resolutely refuse to conjecture too much about the future. That I would even say, like, give me, spin out for me, like your sci-fi vision of what this looks like, like, are we living in these space needles, you know? And they were just like, I don't know, like, I can talk about the next 10 or 20 years, and I can tell you a lot of exciting things. It's a very exciting time to be working on this stuff. But like, I couldn't possibly tell you, like, where we're going to be.

Or like, so people would be like, yeah, maybe in 50 years we do all just, like, fly out of our windows or fly off of our rooftops. It's not unimaginable, but also, like, really, who knows? It brings me back to the first question that I asked you. The question, where's my flying car? And I feel like we've gone through now three categories of explanation. The first explanation was, it's the government's fault. The physical world was regulated so much that made it impossible to build stuff. Number two, it's technology's fault. It just took a while for the underlying technology of EV-Talls to develop the batteries, electronic propulsion, excuse me, electric propulsion sensors.

The third category of explanation that I keep coming back to is that in a way, it's the flying cars fault. That is, flying personal vehicles are not an easy natural evolution of the personal automobile in America. Like cars are a networked technology, like an infrastructural technology, right? You have roads. You have stoplights, you have traffic signs, you have seatbelts, you have police, you have this network of infrastructure and civic care that supports the technology. And that is very hard to translate to the skies en masse, right?

Because really, if you think about it at an individual per house level, it's very difficult to imagine every house having an EV toll that lifts up into the sky and flies autonomously. that creates all sorts of noise issues and potential accident issues. And then once you get into the thing of like, the question in the back of my head that I keep having to shush as you talk is, what about Evie toll buses? What about flying buses?

And then I kept thinking about like, oh, what about a flying bus that takes off from a certain kind of port and then you put like 400, like 200 people on it and then you fly it 300 miles. It's like, oh, Derek, you just invented the fucking airplane.

Like, this technology exists. You just reasoned yourself backward as something that's 100 years old. And so I do think that, like, from a use case standpoint, and I don't want us to be, I don't want dreamers to be beholden to the use case question all the time. But it is just hard to think of a place where flying cars fit safely and logically into the way that people move around. And that's why, I want to off-ramp this to allow you to comment, but it's why I'm especially interested in your explanations of how new

transportation technologies can unlock new kinds of transportation. Maybe that's what it is. It's hard for me to imagine the use case because the technology doesn't exist. And the existence of the safe technology will create a new way of traveling. We'll create, say, a new opportunity

for, say, super commuters to, like, live 150 miles outside of the city where they work, but also, like, get into work all the time, that that might be just something that becomes much more common when people can move much more quickly throughout the country. So, I don't know, that's the third category of explanation that kept coming up for me is the maybe flying cars are just an incredibly difficult problem to solve when you really look at it closely. I think that's all absolutely right. And also that, like all of that infrastructure and all of those kind of appurtenances you're

describing are just much easier to do on the ground. But even on the ground, it took decades to set all of that up. I mean, the gloss that I would put on that, and like, maybe this is, like, this was sort of my way of, like, like, making a similar point in the piece is that, like, there, it's funny that, like, we've been kind of imagining, I mean, along lines you were describing, imagining flying cars in this, in this vacuum where, like, the best symbol of that is, like, you look at the Jetsons, and, like, George Jetson had, like, a little spaceship that folded up into a briefcase and like what did he use it for? He used it just to get to work quickly.

And then he gets to work and he doesn't even do anything. He gets to the Sprockets Company and he puts his feet up on the desk. So like what's funny about that is that like it like it slots. It's this incredible technology that like we've been like lusting after for so long. And it just slots into his world and doesn't really change anything else. And like that's not how this would work that like, you know, or that's not how it should work. I mean to me like that shows like, a great impoverishment, like, insofar as we're attached to this kind of like retrofuturistic

idea of what, like, a few, like the future would be that like in this age of great abundance, like where, you know, at least for white suburbanites, like, what were their fantasies? Their fantasies were like a robot made and like not having to sit in traffic. And like to me, like there are, there's more that we would hope to get out of technology than just like getting to work 15 minutes faster, right? And as you were talking, I thought, like, what is the technology that exists in the 2020s that allows certain privileged people to commute to work almost instantaneously? And that same technology folds up into the shape of a briefcase. We already have it.

I am talking to you on a laptop, you know? And again, the point is not that remote work is available to everyone, but that for those whom it is available. to, in a way it is doing at sort of an existential level exactly what George Jetson was doing with the flying car. He wasn't using the flying car to unlock new horizons in the human experience and, you know, emotional flourishing. He was using it to get to a place of work where he could be kind of bored and maybe a little bit productive. That's what the laptop already does. Anyway, funny that we ended there. The flying car exists. It's called the laptop. Not where I thought we'd end, but this is so fascinating.

And I really appreciated this piece, which was just such a thorough and eye-opening look at the 100-year history of this technology, arguments about it, which are so central to my work. And also a wonderful tour of the landscape of people working on this tech. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Gideon. Well, thank you so much for having me, Derek. This has been great. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Biroldi. We've got new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. If you like what you're hearing, give us, five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast.

For feedback and episode suggestions, email us at plain English at Spotify.com.