“Perhaps we’ll make a flying automobile, only for enjoyable,” Elon Musk informed the Unbiased back in 2014.
The information outlet insisted on the time that Musk wasn’t joking and that he must be taken critically, given his success with different firms like PayPal. On the time, the Tesla CEO was price a measly $8.4 billion based on Forbes, a fraction of the $413 billion he presently holds on paper. However when a billionaire CEO says he’s going to do one thing, you’re supposed to listen to him out.
“We might undoubtedly make a flying automobile—however that’s not the exhausting half,” Musk was quoted as saying in 2014. “The exhausting half is, how do you make a flying automobile that’s tremendous protected and quiet? As a result of if it’s a howler, you’re going to make individuals very sad.”
Cybertrucks within the sky
Nicely, Musk by no means constructed a flying automobile. In all probability as a result of there are various extra hurdles past making them quiet. Piloting them, as an example, poses an enormous downside since most individuals aren’t skilled to fly. However Musk clearly hasn’t given up the dream. Or he hasn’t given up the hype, to be extra exact. As a result of Musk likes to toss out wild concepts to get consideration and advised in a brand new tweet Tuesday that Tesla is likely to be taking over the problem of flying vehicles, writing, “Perhaps Tesla ought to make this.”
Musk was quote-tweeting an AI-generated video of a Cybertruck outfitted with wings. The car is seen flying amongst a post-apocalyptic wasteland “run by robots,” which appear to be hulking round with no actual goal.
Perhaps Tesla ought to make this https://t.co/9ieoqM03Wu
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 19, 2025
Can Musk pull it off? We’re not going to carry our breath.
The historical past of flying automobile guarantees
Flying vehicles have been imagined for nicely over a century, with inventors and widespread tech magazines insisting they had been at all times simply across the nook. There was the flying car of 1923, imagined in Science and Invention journal for 50 years into the longer term. There have been the flying vehicles of the Fifties, together with a prototype that actually flew. And there was good ol’ George Jetson within the Nineteen Sixties, signalling to younger child boomers of the time {that a} wondrous, shiny future awaited them by the point they received older. The flying automobile felt inevitable for almost each technology of the twentieth century.
However no person might fairly pull it off. One of the notorious flying vehicles was the flying Pinto of 1973. Two guys based an organization in 1968 known as Superior Car Engineers, abbreviated as AVE, with the dream of mass-producing flying vehicles in California. The lads strapped the wings and rear engine mount of a Cessna aircraft onto a Ford Pinto, a automobile that was identified to blow up even when it stayed safely on the bottom. The corporate founders took off within the car from Ventura County Airport on Sept. 11, 1973, and crashed, killing both men.
And but, flying vehicles are at all times just a bit past the horizon. In case you take an in depth take a look at the headlines, flying vehicles are sometimes promised to be simply two years away. It’s a pattern I famous back in 2015 when AeroMobil mentioned their flying automobile could be launched by 2017. I promised on the time that I might actually eat the solar if that automobile was launched to the general public. Evidently, I didn’t have to aim such a feat. It didn’t assist that AeroMobil crashed throughout a take a look at flight, although nobody died. The corporate closed down for good in 2023.
You possibly can’t even promote Cybertrucks on the bottom
I’m not going to say that Musk won’t ever create a flying automobile. They’ve been built before, and so they exist in some type. The factor that doesn’t exist is a marketplace for them. Individuals must get a pilot’s license to fly a roadable plane. Musk, because the wealthiest particular person within the historical past of the world, might simply use a few of his $413 billion to construct a aircraft that appears like a Cybertruck. The query is whether or not he might mass-produce one that individuals would really purchase.
Tesla has bought simply 52,000 Cybertrucks since they had been launched in November 2023, based on CNBC, far in need of the 1 million preorders the corporate received when the truck was first introduced in 2019. A part of that may have one thing to do with the truth that the Cybertruck is way more costly than what was promised. Or it could possibly be that it doesn’t have the vary or towing capability that was initially marketed. These pathetic gross sales may also have one thing to do with these two Nazi-style salutes Musk gave on the day of President Trump’s inauguration again in January. Who is aware of for certain?
No matter it’s, constructing a flying Cybertruck for mass adoption appears extraordinarily unlikely proper now or any time within the foreseeable future. Until Musk was speaking much less concerning the flying Cybertruck in that AI-generated video and was referring to the apocalypse half. That appears very doable.
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