But the proof of concept of auto-cars generally works. The kinks don't seem insurmountable, just a series of incremental improvements and economies of scale.
Flying cars on the other hand have some really big problems to tackle, such as noise pollution. And robots with "common sense" still seem a long ways off. There is no proof of concept that's even close.
Why does no one consider a helicopter to be a "flying car"? What can a flying car do that a helicopter can't? The only difference I see is that a flying car would be cheaper and owned by more people, which a helicopter could easily be if people actually wanted a flying car. Helicopters are expensive because they're very niche devices.
The fact that almost no one owns a helicopter proves that people don't actually want flying cars.
To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy them for personal use. (I know this anecdotally from a relative involved in sales of Airbus helicopters.) If you addressed the cost and safety issues no doubt more people would buy them.
So did cars when they were first introduced. Since they solved a need, there was a great incentive to make them easier to use and easier to repair. That incentive doesn't exist for helicopters because most people don't own helicopters.
>To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy them for personal use.
I'm glad you pointed this out, I didn't make that argument because it would ruin the surprise, but yeah. People do use flying cars, and they're called helicopters. They're just used by very rich people or people with enough training to operate them. But think in cities like NYC, helicopters are used just like cars would be, because using a car can be unpractical. Functionally there is no difference between Michael Bloomberg traveling to Newark via a limo versus via a helicopter: both park at his building and can transport him from his home to his destination. It's a flying car.
>If you addressed the cost and safety issues no doubt more people would buy them.
The incentive to improve cost and safety only exists if demand exists. Cars only got cheaper and safer when the public began buying them. Flying cars (helicopters) will only become safer and cheaper if people start demanding them as well. The fact that they're not, IMO, proves people don't actually want flying cars.
No one in NYC, not even Bloomberg, is landing, let alone parking, his helicopter at his office. It is completely impractical in terms of safety, space and noise, even if it were just one person doing it, and absurdly infeasible to think it could be scaled up to, say, just the number of people using the Lincoln tunnel in any given half-hour. There are a few helipads around the edges of the city (a number that is likely to decrease on account of noise), that cater to some of the transportation needs of a number of people that can be counted in the hundreds per day, not hundreds of thousands.
The idea that if there is a wish, a solution would have been found by now, does not stand up to the most cursory examination - for one thing, if it were so, not many people would be dying.
I agree it's a genuinely difficult problem, but we might agree for different reasons. I think it's a genuinely difficult problem because there is no way to make a flying car as safe as a car that is stuck to the ground. There's just not. Normal cars break down, they run out of gas, they stop working all the time. You coast to a stop and call a tow truck. Flying cars break down and you plummet to your death. Normal cars crash into each other in just 2 dimensions. Flying cars crash into each other in three dimensions, and then you plummet to your death. Normal cars get stuck in traffic and sit with their engines at idle, producing small amounts of pollution, noise, wind and heat, yet still contribute substantially to global warming. Flying cars sitting at idle in a traffic jam still have to hover above the ground, which means they're running their engines almost as hard as if they were actually moving, producing tons more waste byproduct than even the most gas-guzzling SUV.
Of course, my argument isn't "flying cars are a bad idea", so all of those points might seem offtopic. But it links back to the idea that we already have flying cars and we've already realized that it's a terrible idea. Short of true anti-gravity, a flying car is always going to be less safe, more polluting, more complicated mechanically, and is always a bad idea. If people actually wanted flying cars, we would deal with the downsides long enough for smart people to overcome the reliability and price issues, but overcoming "plummeting to your death" is a genuinely difficult problem that only has one solution: true anti-grav that works even when the power is disconnected. Since that's a far-future sci-fi plot, the closest thing we have to flying cars is a helicopter.
It just turns out that using them as reliable daily individual transport is a really bad idea.
I think you may be misinterpreting my last sentence. What I mean is that, just because medical science has not delivered immortality, it doesn't mean that there aren't lots of people who would prefer not to die. You could substitute specific causes of death, such as cancer or alzheimer's, into that argument, if you think that most people have come to terms with their mortality.
Let's beg the question and assume people want to go to the mall with their flying car, that's their primary use case. They can't do this right now because there are no parking spaces at the mall for their helicopter. There are no parking spaces for their helicopter because no one is flying to the mall with their helicopter. If people did, the mall would build parking for them. This is shown by the fact that places where people regularly fly helicopters, there is dedicated helicopter parking. It's just as valid for me to say "the fact that helicopters exist but are uncommon proves people don't want flying cars" as it is for you to say "helicopters are not flying cars".
I'll ask the question again: why do people not consider helicopters to be flying cars? They do exactly what people want a flying car to do: they take off and land vertically, they can fit in a reasonably sized parking space, they can easily maneuver in three dimensions, and they hold passengers and cargo. I argue that helicopters are flying cars, and they're proof that most people don't actually want flying cars.
All you've done is said "nah bro", and when challenged, you then insulted my intelligence while admitting you have no actual argument against me. All you seem to be able to argue against is my argument style and then later my intelligence, which is not an argument against my opinion at all.
I'm really disappointed here, I wanted an actual conversation about why helicopters are not considered flying cars and all I get is someone saying "they're not because I said they're not".
Please, please actually argue against my points or don't argue at all. Insulting me is not an argument.