Flying cars should not be for the masses – at least, not yet
A key obstacle facing flying cars is the opinion that the only reason to finance development is to create a mass market commuter's product. That's what's killing it. That's the failure model that's been tried and tried and tried, and failed and failed and failed. The car and motorcycle markets vastly outnumber the tiny aircraft market, so that eventual opportunity is built in if you can just get out of the gate.
What's important right now is that people who really want flying cars can have them; they've been around for 100 years, so they need to focus on getting one for themselves and continue making improvements to perfect it.
We have to get beyond this approach of making incredibly compromised mass-market designs. Just get on with building stuff as well as you can and use it. That's it. That's what flying cars need. We need a couple hundred traveling around every day, passing people on the freeway, passing people in the air and just getting on with traveling and racing. If people want to reduce their commute times, I suggest they move closer to work.
I don't really care about people that want safe vehicles. I care about people that want to BASE jump. Those are the people that drive things in the new world. I'm not designing for people who are focused on their fears, or to provide opportunities for their fears to be extended and coddled. People in the motorcycle and experimental aircraft culture are cautiously optimistic. I support them.
I want to focus on people that want make things better, find ways to do it, and have the sensibilities and the situational awareness to do it in a safe manner. There's a lot of people like that. People like Richard Petty, he's gonna die of old age, not from car crashes. He definitely pushed the limits, and he's still with us today.
People like Buzz Aldrin, who go to outer space and come back, and live a full life and have fun. I don't need to make things for safe people when I can make something for Buzz! Let's find a few of those people and really provide for them and not for the perceived fears of your perceived buyer who most definitely and definitively never brought you a dollar.