Silicon Valley needs to stop talking about flying cars

Flying cars are all the rage in Silicon Valley. The latest broke cover this week — it’s produced by a Larry Page-backed startup, modestly called “Kitty Hawk.” (The Wright brothers are so stoked!)

There’s just one problem: It isn’t indeed a flying car. It’s basically a drone with pontoons and some controls. Check it out in the photo above. Does that look like a flying car to you?

Here’s a rundown of all the buzzy “flying cars” that have been making news. There are some big names in there, including Airbus and Uber. But only two vehicles could decently be termed flying cars — because they can both fly and drive.

Included in our roundup is the company that has made the most progress on a decent flying car: Terrafugia, a Massachusetts-based garment that has been in the flying-car game for about a decade. I covered its progress when it very first spinned out its Transition, a flying car that was destined to sell for a few hundred grand, that would run on regular gas, and that didn’t require much flight training to operate.

The Terrafugia Transition. Terrafugia

The Transition was, stringently speaking, more of a “roadable aircraft” than a flying car — but at least it could be driven like a car. The idea was to provide people with a way to drive inbetween the petite airfields that dot the US landscape while covering greater distances in the air.

The Transition simply refined and extended the actually rather long history of inventors putting wings on cars. It’s not a complicated principle: If you can link a wing and a rudder to a car and figure out how to control the flight surfaces, physics will get you airborne and keep you up there.

The historic problem is twofold. Until Terrafugia came along, flying cars were usually adequate as cars and lousy as planes. Even the Transition is a fairly awkward car. But at least is embodies the notion of transformation. This is how flying cars are meant to work — it’s how they work in the movies!

A real flying car, as imagined by television. ABC / Agents of SHIELD screencap

In the movies, however, we see a lot of vertical-takeoff flying cars, a daunting engineering challenge because cars have to be pretty strong, while aircraft are supposed to be light. What works on land militates against what succeeds in the air.

From what I can tell, many of the so-called flying-car projects coming out of techtopia are vertical-takeoff-and-landing designs. And so their creators have cut to the pursue and determined to skip the entire roadworthy aspect and go straight to a car-as-metaphor angle, while preserving the romance of flying cars. So what we’re observing are private VTOL contraptions that would function more as replacements for cars and planes.

They would fly everywhere and drive nowhere.

Harry Potter’s flying car used magic. Warner Bros. Pictures

The arrival of larger and larger drones has enabled this type of thinking, to the detriment of true flying-car enthusiasts. But it’s nothing fresh. For decades, you’ve been able to buy ultralight aircraft that require little in the way of pilot training to operate. Puny helicopters and autogyros have also been around for ages. Nobody called them “cars” — because they aren’t cars! And their creators and fans had humility!

Not so with the “flying car” frauds of Silicon Valley. They are either repackaging technologies we’ve already seen or doing the drone-car mashup thing, surfing the lastest gadgetry trend.

Somebody needs to put a stop to this, and that somebody is me. I know a flying car when I see one, and I’m sorry, Larry Page, but your pontoon drone is no flying car.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Insider.

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