With help from Christine Mui In September 1962, George Jetson and his family puttered onto television embodying a memorable vision of the future. Decades later, we use a surprising amount of their cartoon technology every day: video calls, electric toothbrushes, smartwatches, even robot vacuums. But one thing remains elusive: the flying car that George drove in every opening sequence, running multidirectional errands with his family. The flying car occupies an almost mythological place in the arc of technological innovation — an always just-out-of reach vision of how humans will someday get around. Inventors have been hatching plans for more than a century, and they’ve become a running joke in the tech world about the future we didn’t get. But flying cars are now a serious prospect — including for the U.S. government. “You're going to start seeing aircraft certified, I think, next year, that would be referred to by some as flying cars,” Federal Aviation Administration chief Michael Whitaker told the POLITICO Tech podcast. “We're really at the beginning of that era. We're going to start seeing them in the marketplace.” Notably, Whitaker himself — the top official of the entire FAA — was an executive for nearly four years at Hyundai’s flying car division, Supernal. Even before his arrival the agency unveiled a step-by-step plan to get the “advanced air mobility” sector, as it’s called, up and running by 2028. Since then regulators have been in rule-writing mode, most recently proposing training requirements for pilots. Listen to the first of a two-part episode on flying cars on today’s POLITICO Tech, available on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast player. The “flying cars” he’s talking about aren't exactly the ones Hollywood promised. Many more closely resemble helicopters or drones, and they use the less-cool name “electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft,” or eVTOLs. In recent years, eVTOLs have become lighter and their batteries more powerful, making them capable of flying higher, further and faster with each new iteration. Proponents argue they have also gotten safer to operate than other types of aircraft, with back-up engines, simple pilot controls and parachutes. “You don't understand how safe it is until you actually see it and try it,” said Jim Dukhovny, the co-founder and CEO of San Mateo, Calif.-based Alef Aeronautics, which last year became the first flying car company to receive a special FAA certification to conduct test flights. Alef's flying car, the Model A, looks sci-fi at its finest, at least in the company’s promotional images. Picture a roadster with a body like a sewer grate so air can flow through, and a passenger cabin that swivels so the vehicle could drive flat on the road or tilt onto its side and take flight. So far more than 3,200 people have pre-ordered the vehicle, at $300,000 a pop. “If everything goes right, if regulations do not change, we plan to start production of the first one by the end of 2025,” Dukhovny said. “Every word in that sentence matters, and usually [the] media prints ‘2025.’ The whole sentence matters.” Flying cars still come with a lot of ifs. In the near term, many experts expect access will be limited, with flights primarily allowed over short distances and outside of dense urban centers. And many early eVTOLs could effectively function as air taxis for the rich, shuttling people from helipads to airports, for instance. That’s not exactly the Jetsons. There’s also public opinion to win over. In a 2017 University of Michigan survey, more than 80 percent of people were moderately to very concerned about the safety of flying cars. In fact, about the same percentage of people said aircraft should be required to come with a parachute, you know, just in case. Similar sentiment has slowed automotive innovations before. Motorists have resisted electric vehicles, for instance, for fear the battery will run out of juice. Or autonomous vehicles for fear of giving up control and having a collision. Now take those fears, pack them into a winged capsule and suspend them high above the Earth. Whitaker’s job is to keep those worst-case scenarios at bay without grounding a new form of transportation that, he argues, could transform our commutes and other personal travel in the decades to come. (Whitaker himself doesn’t aspire to own a flying car, but says he’d welcome a new way to get between Washington and his second home in Vermont.) “The technology is changing so quickly that you need a more flexible approach, but you also need to keep the system safe,” Whitaker said. Whitaker said the approval process will focus less on how aircraft are designed, and more on what they can do and how safely they do it. There’s no consensus yet on how flying cars should look — the Vertical Flight Society counts more than 1,000 different designs — but safety standards are pivotal for gaining public trust, he said. “A lot of what folks are talking about in the future hasn't been invented yet, so it's hard to really create rules about something that doesn't exist,” Whitaker added. “We're trying to really keep up with that dynamic.” | 
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