The article is responding to claims by CEOs of car companies, industry and business press, and other hype sources that keep predicting flying cars next year or so. It's predicting that, against this hype, it will not come to pass. Not sure why you've worded your comment in such a way as if the article was hyping up flying cars.
Not to mention, since we do have helicopters, the engineering challange of flying cars is almost entirely unrelated to energy costs (at least for the super rich, the equivalent of, say, a Rolls Royce, not of a Toyota). The thing stopping flying cars from existing is that it is extremely hard to make an easy to pilot flying vehicle, given the numerous degrees of freedom (and potential catastrophic failure modes); and the significantly higher impredictability and variance of the medium (air vs road surface).
Plus, the major problem of noise pollution, which gets to extreme levels for somewhat fundamental reasons (you have to diaplace a whole lot of air to fly; which is very close to having to create sound waves).
So, overall, the energy problem is already fixed, we already have point-to-point flying vehicles usable, and occasionally used, in urban areas, helicopters. Making them safe when operated by a very lightly trained pilot, and silent enough to not wake up a neighborhood, are the real issues that will persist even if we had mini fusion reactors.
I'm not sure that this disproves my original point that self driving cars and flying cars don't belong in the same list because they are fundamentally different engineering problems.
Not to mention, since we do have helicopters, the engineering challange of flying cars is almost entirely unrelated to energy costs (at least for the super rich, the equivalent of, say, a Rolls Royce, not of a Toyota). The thing stopping flying cars from existing is that it is extremely hard to make an easy to pilot flying vehicle, given the numerous degrees of freedom (and potential catastrophic failure modes); and the significantly higher impredictability and variance of the medium (air vs road surface).
Plus, the major problem of noise pollution, which gets to extreme levels for somewhat fundamental reasons (you have to diaplace a whole lot of air to fly; which is very close to having to create sound waves).
So, overall, the energy problem is already fixed, we already have point-to-point flying vehicles usable, and occasionally used, in urban areas, helicopters. Making them safe when operated by a very lightly trained pilot, and silent enough to not wake up a neighborhood, are the real issues that will persist even if we had mini fusion reactors.