That old article about flying cars being here by 2020 still haunts me

I was talking to my uncle who worked at Boeing in the 90s and he told me about this prediction they took seriously back then. He said they actually had a 1997 memo talking about personal air vehicles being mainstream within 20 years. It hit different because he showed me the actual document with projected sales numbers for 2010 that were completely wrong. We sat there laughing but also realizing how many billions got wasted chasing that dream. Makes me wonder what current predictions we are going to look back on with the same facepalm feeling. Has anyone else found old internal corporate predictions that missed the mark by a mile?

2 comments

2 Comments

carr.willow28d ago

Flying cars never made sense as a mass market thing though... the infrastructure alone would cost trillions and we can barely keep roads paved. Those old projections assumed people would magically stop crashing into each other in 3D space which is just not how humans work. Driverless cars have been struggling for over a decade just to handle basic intersections and people want to add a vertical axis to that chaos. The whole thing reads like tech bros who never had to deal with actual traffic laws or insurance companies. We laugh at those predictions now but the same pattern keeps happening with AI and crypto stuff too.

foster.wade28d ago

Bet you'd change your tune if you saw what Joby's actually doing with their air taxi testing.