Do you remember the first time you stalled a car? Now imagine if stalling your car did not result in an embarrassing fumble to quell the demented blaring horns of the queuing traffic behind you but instead resulted in instant death by thousand-foot plunge, ironically, onto the road below. Welcome to the future of the flying car.

How would you recover a flying car??

There’s a reason that flying cars have not, so to speak, taken off: they’re rubbish. For starters, think of the theory test. Where would you begin? Check out this multiple choice brain noodler, which surely would have to be a must for any self-respecting flying car driving school:

‘You encounter a broken-down flying car. Do you:
a) Watch it plummet through the air until it explodes like John Woo’s wet dream on the tarmac below;
b) Witness the passengers inside desperately fumbling with parachutes which don’t work properly because they bought a Fiat;
c) Continue on your journey towards the oncoming flock of pigeons?’

So you’ve passed your test, and your false leg is working fine after a slight collision with a Fox News helicopter on your first driving lesson. You’re out in the garden on a summer’s day, enjoying a nice glass of Tropicana, or maybe a beer. A small black dot appears in the sky above, like a hover fly, getting bigger and bigger and bigger until the outline is incontrovertibly that of a flying car. The learner inside has stalled and his driving instructor is now reading them the last rites as they whistle through the air into your garden. Bang, there goes your other leg.

What's that in the sky?

Humankind is simply not ready for the flying car. Our metaphors for driving are too hackneyed to extend into a third dimension. One thing you can be sure of on a road is that if you stop, you will not die. This is an incredibly important aspect of driving that no one has really attempted to adapt in flight. If things are going wrong, pull over and stop, turn the engine off, you’re fine. Now try turning off the engine of a helicopter, or stopping a plane in mid-air. Both actions will result in almost instant death. I say instant because you will have just enough time to realise what’s going on and spend the remaining few seconds of your life in mortal terror, cursing the day you bought a Fiat.

Worse still, our skies are already busy enough. It is highly unlikely that flying cars would cruise at the same altitudes as a standard commerical airliner, but as those planes came into land they would start to take up precious airborne real estate. The mind’s eye now renders the I75 as a tapestry of death, an outline of carnage around Atlanta as it turns into a Michael Bay dream of broken things. JFK would become known by some media-coined nickname like ‘St. Nick’s arsehole’ as Jumbo Jets rammed Fiats full-on, creating giant fireballs that make the end of Con-Air look like a textbook landing.

Then there’s the noise. An airplane after take-off generates enough racket to drown out your TV from a couple of miles away. Now imagine thousands of mini-planes taking off everyday. Rush hour would cause catastrophic hearing damage. TV would have to sound like a Who concert. Chavs would be able to fit massive vibrating fake exhausts to the engines of their second-hand Vauxhall Flybys, a sound akin to hugging the takeoff outlets of a Harrier Jump Jet. All of this before anyone has even got in the air.

Once you’re in the air, things just keep getting tougher. Imagine being stuck in a mid-air traffic jam, your arse suspended from certain death by a couple of inches of Italian-made spit and polish, a new kind of stress that you would never really become accustomed to. Now think what it means to run out of petrol in mid-air. On the road, someone in front of you hits their hazard lights and you might sigh or swear and pull out into the next lane to continue with your journey. In an equivalent flying-car scenario you would be sitting in the queue minding your own business when the bloke in front of you plummets to the ground like a dart, perhaps falling silently the whole way like Wile E. Coyote as his Fiat eats tarmac, maybe in some delicious twist of fate crushing the Fiat of some poor sod on the road below who thought flying cars were a bad idea. How could you possibly continue with your journey? You would have to pull over and turn your engine off for a bit, just to chill out, at which point you’d realise you’d turned your engine off in mid-air and you too would plunge to a fateless death.

It’s extraordinary that the idea of the flying car still appeals to so many people. Perhaps the concept could exist as a recreational pursuit, established within the boundaries of a theme park. A winner-takes-all flying dodgems would be the most extreme form of thrill-seeking imaginable, a nihilistic pursuit where the aim is to be the last flying dodgem not exploded or on fire. You’d have to worry about a lot more than losing a tooth on that ride. It would kick seven shits out of Universal Studios too. And if you got stuck in the air, an inbred carny would jetpack his way over to you to push you back into open play. Now that’s an idea.

Wonder why people have looked up and thought of a flying car?

We accept car crashes and fatalities. They are so subconscious as to be invisible. We have had a century to become accustomed to the car and its sometimes tragic consequences. Unless there is a truly collossal accident on our roads, it goes unreported. It’s unlikely the same nonchalance would be afforded to the first flying car accident. It would be like the Hindenburg all over again, except the news would be a rolling report about how nobody had seen anything yet and they weren’t sure whether anyone was going to be able to tell anyone else anything more but, be damned, they were going to keep reporting the fact. To any of you still enamoured with the idea, good luck to you. If the utopian vision ever comes to fruition, I will be tunnelling everywhere.