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Notes -
The non-flying car in its current form only exists thanks to a collective irrationality about safety - people (both individually behind the wheel and collectively as voters) treat life as being an order of magnitude cheaper on the roads than it is in other contexts. There is no comparably dangerous activity except driving where it is socially acceptable to do it in a public place with only $50,000 of liability insurance. If someone proposed cars, driven by ordinary citizens, as a new transportation technology then we would ban it - and by the criteria we normally use to judge dangerous technology we would be right to do so. Car crashes are the largest cause of premature death in most rich countries.
Even with the current regulatory environment, general aviation is about 10x more dangerous than driving. (We tolerate this because private flying is seen as an expensive extreme hobby in the tradition of yachting or snowboarding. Also because the regulatory environment makes it very hard for a pilot to injure other people through ordinary non-culpable stupidity. And even so a pilot with less than a million dollars of liability insurance is going to get the stinkeye from airport and hangar operators.) Another way of putting it is that the mean time between fatal crashes (slightly over 100,000 hours) is only slightly longer than a career (80,000 hours). If a job was as dangerous as an average licensed pilot flying a plane maintained properly by average licensed mechanics, then most people doing that job would not survive to retirement. A plane flown by someone with the skill level of the average driver and maintained by the average motor mechanic would be dramatically more dangerous.
The sequel to Where's my Flying Car should be called The Texas Planesaw Massacre.
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