11 Years Later, Elon Musk Is Floating the Flying Car Scam Again

Gizmodo

5 hours ago

'Maybe we'll make a flying car, just for fun,' Elon Musk told the Independent back in 2014.
The news outlet insisted at the time that Musk wasn't joking and that he should be taken seriously, given his success with other companies like PayPal. At the time, the Tesla CEO was worth a measly $8.4 billion according to Forbes, a fraction of the $413 billion he currently holds on paper. But when a billionaire CEO says he's going to do something, you're supposed to hear him out.
'We could definitely make a flying car—but that's not the hard part,' Musk was quoted as saying in 2014. 'The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy.'
Well, Musk never built a flying car. Probably because there are many more hurdles beyond making them quiet. Piloting them, for instance, poses a huge problem since most people aren't trained to fly. But Musk clearly hasn't given up the dream. Or he hasn't given up the hype, to be more precise. Because Musk loves to toss out wild ideas to get attention and suggested in a new tweet Tuesday that Tesla might be taking up the challenge of flying cars, writing, 'Maybe Tesla should make this.'
Musk was quote-tweeting an AI-generated video of a Cybertruck outfitted with wings. The vehicle is seen flying among a post-apocalyptic wasteland 'run by robots,' which seem to be hulking around with no real purpose.
Maybe Tesla should make this https://t.co/9ieoqM03Wu
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 19, 2025Can Musk pull it off? We're not going to hold our breath.
Flying cars have been imagined for well over a century, with inventors and popular tech magazines insisting they were always just around the corner. There was the flying car of 1923, imagined in Science and Invention magazine for 50 years into the future. There were the flying cars of the 1950s, including a prototype that actually flew. And there was good ol' George Jetson in the 1960s, signalling to young baby boomers of the time that a wondrous, shiny future awaited them by the time they got older. The flying car felt inevitable for just about every generation of the 20th century.
But nobody could quite pull it off. One of the most infamous flying cars was the flying Pinto of 1973. Two guys founded a company in 1968 called Advanced Vehicle Engineers, abbreviated as AVE, with the dream of mass-producing flying cars in California. The men strapped the wings and rear engine mount of a Cessna plane onto a Ford Pinto, a car that was known to explode even when it stayed safely on the ground. The company founders took off in the vehicle from Ventura County Airport on Sept. 11, 1973, and crashed, killing both men.
And yet, flying cars are always just a little beyond the horizon. If you take a close look at the headlines, flying cars are often promised to be just two years away. It's a trend I noted back in 2015 when AeroMobil said their flying car would be released by 2017. I promised at the time that I would literally eat the sun if that car was released to the public. Needless to say, I didn't have to attempt such a feat. It didn't help that AeroMobil crashed during a test flight, though no one died. The company closed down for good in 2023.
I'm not going to say that Musk will never create a flying car. They've been built before, and they exist in some form. The thing that doesn't exist is a market for them. People need to get a pilot's license to fly a roadable aircraft. Musk, as the wealthiest person in the history of the world, could easily use some of his $413 billion to build a plane that looks like a Cybertruck. The question is whether he could mass-produce one that people would actually buy.
Tesla has sold just 52,000 Cybertrucks since they were released in November 2023, according to CNBC, far short of the 1 million preorders the company got when the truck was first announced in 2019. Part of that might have something to do with the fact that the Cybertruck is much more expensive than what was promised. Or it could be that it doesn't have the range or towing capacity that was initially advertised. Those pathetic sales might also have something to do with those two Nazi-style salutes Musk gave on the day of President Trump's inauguration back in January. Who knows for sure?
Whatever it is, building a flying Cybertruck for mass adoption seems extremely unlikely right now or any time in the foreseeable future. Unless Musk was talking less about the flying Cybertruck in that AI-generated video and was referring to the apocalypse part. That seems very doable.