"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!"

Popular Mechanics has a fun piece up called "Flying Cars, Your So-Called Sci-Fi Life." It's really written by Daniel H. Wilson, a humorist who wrote the tongue-in-cheek How To Survive A Robot Uprising.

It's sort of an excerpt from his new book Where's My Jetpack? The book playfully questions where some of Sci-Fi's most frequent predictions are...such as jet packs and flying cars.

However, there are several companies and private parties actually working on flying cars. Some have prototypes even.

Here's what I never understood about flying cars: roads are 2-dimensional. Sky...is 3-dimensional. How on Earth do we keep any sort of order once cars are able to fly? In Back to the Future 2, there are these little floating lights that are sort of the future's version of highway reflectors...marking the path of the road. But I think that's highly impractical and not the way to solve the problem.

Personally, I would love to have a flying car. I would not, however, love the monthly payment that buying a flying car would bring.

I also want to point out that a flying car...really, if we're honest...is just an airplane. I mean...a flying car is a vehicle that has wheels and can drive on a flat surface but also take off and fly. Sounds a lot like every airplane I've ever seen.

Some of these prototypes even resemble small kit-planes. I mean, why try so hard and spend so much money inventing what already exists? Why don't we just give every citizen a pilot's license and let them start flying planes wherever they want?