The Plane Pays for the Car

Tethered to the Crane

Mara: It's 1988. Paul Moller's flying saucer hangs tethered to a crane, finishing one last test before he's meant to climb in and fly it himself. Then experts spot a problem with engine number eight. The manned flight is scrapped. That day he said, 'it's taken me a bit longer than I planned.' And: 'I'm disappointed I didn't have a chance to fly in it today.'

Eli: A listener wants to know why we don't have flying cars yet. How did people once think they were the future, and then never make them real? And what were they supposed to do better than normal cars? Today's angle is the long quest for personal flight.

Mara: So we follow Moller, and the dreamers before him, from the first garage fantasies to what actually made it into the sky.

Eli: He didn't quit. He kept chasing flying cars through his company, Moller International. But a crane tether is the catch: hovering on a leash isn't flying free. Mara, that gap runs through this whole story.

The Century of Open Skies

Mara: The dream is older than Moller. In the 1920s, cars were getting much cheaper, and the country was in love with flight. A Ford Model T cost $850 when it came out in 1908. By 1925, it was $290. Adjusted for inflation, that's under a fifth of the original price. Smithsonian magazine says that had every 'small f' futurist dreaming up the flying car of tomorrow.

Eli: The price drop is wild. Cheap cars made cheap flight sound like the obvious sequel.

Mara: And the picture was vivid. In 1917, one writer imagined it like this: 'Its owner will start from his garage or hangar, travel streets or roads at will, cross streams or lakes that lie in his path, rise in the air and fly over a hill, a valley, or woods, to another road, all at his pleasure.'

Eli: So the road is home, and flight is the shortcut over obstacles.

Mara: The carmaker behind the Model T believed it too. In 1940 he said, 'Mark my word: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.'

Eli: And the selling point was traffic. A 1923 magazine pitch aimed one at suburban commuters, because roads were already 'so clogged with traffic that it is impossible to get anywhere on time.'

Mara: That's the benefit people pictured: door to door, right over the jam. One transport geography text says the idea 'represents the utmost in terms of personal mobility and freedom that can be conceptualized by the general population.' That's why it never fades. Those pictures all ran on cheap cars and open sky. Physics hadn't weighed in yet.

The Weight Trap

Eli: When it did, the car became the problem. A roadable aircraft is one machine that has to drive the highway and fly the sky. An aerospace engineering professor at the University of Michigan told Popular Science, 'Having a car attached to an airplane is hard to make efficient.' And: 'The car is not going to notice much difference from having the parts of an airplane, but the plane is going to really be impacted by the presence of a car.'

Mara: So the car rides along free, and the plane pays for it.

Eli: Take the engine. A NASA analysis says a car uses only about 20 horsepower at traffic speeds. A personal airplane needs about 160 at typical flight speeds. Plenty of car engines can make that much power, just not for very long.

Mara: Just to stay up there.

Eli: Then the rulebook made it worse. In the 1970s, new federal auto safety regulations arrived. Meeting them would have made the Aerocar too heavy to fly. Safety gear makes a car heavier. Weight is the one thing a plane can't spare.

Mara: And the Aerocar wasn't a sketch. It first flew in 1949. In the mid-1960s, a 19-year-old newspaper photographer rode in it over Longview, with its designer at the controls. Years later he remembered it as cramped, smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle and very noisy. But it took off quickly and felt solid, 'not the least bit rickety.'

Eli: A real machine, then. The weight problem came for something that actually flew.

Mara: It even cleared the regulators. Federal aviation certification came in 1956. Its designer struck a deal with a defense manufacturer for serial production, as long as he could secure 500 orders. He got roughly half that.

Eli: And in the 1970s, a Ford feasibility study estimated 25,000 a year in potential sales.

Mara: Only six Aerocars were ever built. Eli, that's the full production run of the most successful drive-and-fly plane of its era.

The Pivot to the Fleet

Eli: Meanwhile, the man on the crane had already been at it for two decades by 1988.

Mara: Paul Moller's first try came in 1967. He did get into the air, but it was more a hop than a take-off. Problems forced design changes, and he kept building saucers anyway. Then, in 1987, success: he flew the saucer by remote control, with a dummy inside. The next step was Moller himself in the seat.

Eli: A dummy has nothing to lose. A pilot is a different test.

Mara: He knew how unforgiving vertical flight is. In his words, 'nothing comes down faster than a VTOL vehicle upside down.'

Eli: Then there's money. One industry analysis tracks how flying-car efforts kept stalling: 'Compliance drove up prices beyond what customers would pay. Too few customers materialized, and the thin market scared off the capital needed for mass production.'

Mara: That's the Aerocar exactly: never enough firm orders, only six built.

Eli: So the industry stopped trying to win that fight. Today's electric air taxi companies, in one report's words, 'have abandoned the drive-and-fly concept entirely.' They build eVTOLs: electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, battery-powered craft that rise straight up and come straight down. 'They're not trying to build a car that flies.' The professor's point about the plane paying for the car gets answered by dropping the car. Developers walked away from drive-and-fly because meeting car rules and aircraft rules at once proved practically unachievable.

Mara: So the flying car turns into a ride someone books, not one they own.

Eli: And that changes the paperwork. Air taxis built for commercial fleets follow a different regulatory path than personal cars an individual would own.

Mara: That path has started paying off. On June 18, 2026, Joby Aviation received the FAA's first US certificate for an eVTOL design, the fourth worldwide and the first outside China. Moller wanted a craft in every driveway. What's arriving instead is a fleet. Whether that fleet can actually spread across city skies is still unknown, and approval on paper is a long way from aircraft over every rooftop.

Batteries, Vertiports, and Backyards

Eli: The first limit is the battery. Battery technology holds these aircraft to short urban hops. Useful across a city, not for long trips. And the infrastructure to run them at scale doesn't exist yet.

Mara: One eVTOL maker calls noise reduction key to community acceptance and approval.

Eli: That acceptance gets tested on the ground. These aircraft need a vertiport, a dedicated pad where they take off, land and charge. One estimate puts electrifying a single site at about $2 million. Clint Harper says adding vertiports to existing airports is very viable, but a newly built one in the city is more challenging. He describes neighbors 'dealing with helicopter noise, emissions, and other negatives, yet they lack access to the service.'

Mara: The 1917 dream started in the owner's own garage. Now every trip starts with getting to someone else's pad. Researchers at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, known as ZEW, looked at what that does. Getting to a vertiport, waiting, boarding and getting off can shrink the time savings or erase them. Their report concluded that eVTOLs 'raise costs, hardly affect travel times, and cause more emissions than electric cars.'

Eli: So the big promise, saved time, gets nibbled away at both ends.

Mara: Eli, not everyone reads the future that way. Sebastian Thrun holds that autonomous fleets, simpler operation and scale will bring fares down to rideshare rates, opening urban air travel to a wide public. He's flown an aircraft called Flyer himself, and in 2018 his 10-year-old son wanted to.

Eli: Clint Harper is among those who read it the other way: vehicle and infrastructure costs, noise rules, airspace limits and energy demands keep these aircraft for wealthy riders and niche routes. Both readings turn on a number no one has seen yet: the fare once fleets run at scale.

Mara: For now, it's short hops, hard-won landing pads and neighbors listening overhead.

Certified Airspace

Eli: Here's where it stands. As of August 2026, no mass-market flying car is fully certified for everyday personal flight. A few vehicles hold special FAA certificates for testing. None is something a commuter can buy and fly to work.

Mara: Seventy years after the Aerocar's certificate, the driveway is still empty.

Eli: Even the air taxis waited. By March 2026, the FAA hadn't granted a type certificate to any manned electric aircraft.

Mara: Meaning the regulator hadn't signed off on any of those designs as safe to build.

Eli: And that covers only the design. Carrying paying passengers is another step, and as of 2026 the FAA hadn't certified a single electric air taxi for commercial passenger service. The pilot rules came first. In October 2024, the FAA set requirements for pilots and operations in the powered-lift category, where these aircraft sit, and updated its definitions so they can fly commercially. It called those 'the final steps necessary to integrate them into the National Airspace System.'

Mara: China moved first on operations. In March 2025, EHang received the world's first Air Operator Certificates for pilotless, human-carrying aircraft. In the US, Joby's passenger flights in Texas were scheduled to begin in October 2026, the first commercial eVTOL operations in the country. Almost everything launching outside China still has a pilot aboard.

Eli: Tickets on routes, run by operators. That's the shape the old dream took.

Mara: And Paul Moller spent more than fifty years on his M400 Skycar, built to take off and land vertically. The Skycar never achieved free flight.

Eli: So that's why there are no flying cars. A machine that has to be both car and plane ends up heavy, compromised and expensive to make legal, and the plane pays for the car. The industry turned to electric air taxis, run as commercial fleets, instead.

Mara: What to watch now: whether operators can cut build costs and battery replacements enough to price a seat like a rideshare. Whether any drive-and-fly vehicle ever earns full production certification for everyday commuting. And whether neighborhoods will tolerate the noise and the traffic overhead.

Eli: One thing to look up is roadable aircraft.

Mara: Follow flying cars with us as the commercial race takes shape.

Eli: And that's the story. I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Thanks for listening, and until next time.