By Maxwell Tabarrok

Flying cars are used as a synecdoche for all of the 20th-century sci-fi dreams that never came true. But they shouldn’t be grouped with moon cities or Dyson spheres. Private, point-to-point aircraft as cheap as a Chevy Tahoe could have been available decades ago. We should have them by now and could have them soon with a few regulatory changes.

Many outright dismiss the idea of flying cars as impossible science fiction, but small, private, point-to-point aircraft are technologically possible and have been for nearly 100 years. Here is one prototype, the 1935 Pitcairn Autogiro, making a near-vertical landing on the National Mall while surrounded by a crowd and then driving to the Bureau of Air Commerce down the street. The fundamental physics and engineering of flying cars was not a constraint in the early 20th century, and it certainly isn’t now, as demonstrated by electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) aircraft like those made by Beta or Joby.

A working prototype is one thing, but the economic constraints are tougher. Carl Benz invented the first recognizable car in 1885, but its impact was relatively small until Ford started mass-manufacturing the Model T 40 years later. Here too, the flying car could have succeeded. The manufacturing of planes was on an exponential curve upwards starting in the ’40s through to the late ’70s, similar to the path that automobile manufacturing had taken 20 years earlier. In 1979, 18,000 general aviation aircraft were shipped, up from under 4,000 in 1950. A Ford Motors feasibility study of the market potential of Moulton Taylor’s Aerocar—one of the first practical flying cars—estimated likely production and sales of 25,000 units a year. A base model Cessna in 1980 cost about $20,000. If that nominal price had tracked overall inflation, it would be around $80,000 today. The........

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