It's 2025. Where are the flying cars that science fiction predicted decades ago would exist by now?
It's not for lack of effort. Most flying car concepts that have been created over the years however have mostly involved taking a conventional car and modifying it with conventional airplane-like features. A good example of one concept that may actually make it to the marketplace is Klein Vision's AirCar, which is featured in the following short video, which recaps the long history of these concepts:
Klein Vision's concept of a car with retractable flying surfaces has potential, but also has limitations. You can drive it down the road with the wings and tail retracted into the vehicle's body, but to get airborne, you will still need something very much like a dedicated airport runway to transition from road to sky. It's not like you can just lift off the road to get around traffic, you need sufficient space to deploy the wings without potentially smacking into vehicles in adjacent lanes.
Solving that problem will take a very different kind of form factor for the flying car concept. It will take some true outside-the-box thinking because ideally, the successful flying car of the future will fully fit within the space available in a single road lane and be able to lift off and get above traffic without coming into contact with other vehicles sharing the road at will.
That's why we find CycloTech's CruiseUp concept to be fascinating. Introduced in the following video, if it proves technologically viable, it could deliver the kind of mobility that futurists and every motorist who has ever been stuck in traffic have long wanted in a flying car:
Klein Vision and CycloTech's concepts represent different paths to get from highway to skyway. At this point of 2025, we're just happy that both concepts are getting real world tryouts.
Labels: technology
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