Photo: Airbus 
 
 What’s that? Airbus is doubling down on its promise of a flying car? Cool! Just what 2017 needed: Yet another wishful plan in the near 100-year quest to make flying cars a reality. Will it happen? (Probably not.) 
 
 Airbus formed a division called Urban Air Mobility, Reuters reports, and — in an act of media-hype that momentarily stupefied me — it apparently has some ideas: A “vehicle to transport individuals,” as the news agency literally put it, along with “a helicopter-style vehicle that can carry multiple vehicles.” 
 
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 I believe these concepts are known, respectively, as a “car” and a “helicopter.” Will the Vehicle To Transport Individuals fly? It’s not exactly clear. So what are we talking about here? A flying helicopter? OK. 
 
 
 
 From the story: 
 
 “One hundred years ago, urban transport went underground, now we have the technological wherewithal to go above ground,” Airbus CEO Tom Enders told the DLD digital tech conference in Munich, adding he hoped the Airbus could fly a demonstration vehicle for single-person transport by the end of the year. “We are in an experimentation phase, we take this development very seriously,” he said, adding that Airbus recognized such technologies would have to be clean to avoid further polluting congested cities. 
 
 It’s unclear if Airbus plans to make its prototype similar to the one it sketched out last fall, but the point is it’s still not feasible. We’ve been talking about flying cars for nearly 100 years, and what needs to be tackled to actually use one in public... well, it’s a stretch. If it’s reliable, that’s important, but the Federal Aviation Administration also has to approve it. So: a stretch. 
 
 
 
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 Enders also pitched the idea as being a weird form of austerity. If we can fly, he says, why take care of the roads? 
 
 “With flying, you don’t need to pour billions into concrete bridges and roads,” he reportedly said, indifferent to the fact the auto industry is simultaneously on a quest to bring autonomous vehicles to the market as soon as possible, while also neglecting the fact that human-driven cars will be on the road for some time to come. Meaning: We’ll still need roads. 
 
 
 
 There’s more. Reuters says the objective for Airbus is to allow people to book a vehicle using an app, because Mobility requires an app. 
 
 Anyway, flying cars (c. 1921). Cool. ||||| Airbus Group Chief Executive Tom Enders speaks during a news conference on the aerospace group's annual results, in London, Britain February 24, 2016. REUTERS/Hannah McKay 
 
 MUNICH (Reuters) - Airbus Group plans to test a prototype for a self-piloted flying car as a way of avoiding gridlock on city roads by the end of the year, the aerospace group’s chief executive said on Monday. 
 
 Airbus last year formed a division called Urban Air Mobility that is exploring concepts such as a vehicle to transport individuals or a helicopter-style vehicle that can carry multiple riders. The aim would be for people to book the vehicle using an app, similar to car-sharing schemes. 
 
 “One hundred years ago, urban transport went underground, now we have the technological wherewithal to go above ground,” Airbus CEO Tom Enders told the DLD digital tech conference in Munich, adding he hoped the Airbus could fly a demonstration vehicle for single-person transport by the end of the year. 
 
 “We are in an experimentation phase, we take this development very seriously,” he said, adding that Airbus recognized such technologies would have to be clean to avoid further polluting congested cities. 
 
 He said using the skies could also reduce costs for city infrastructure planners. “With flying, you don’t need to pour billions into concrete bridges and roads,” he said. 
 
 Enders said Airbus, as the world’s largest maker of commercial helicopters, wanted to invest to make the most of new technologies such as autonomous driving and artificial intelligence, to usher in what amounts to an era of flying cars. 
 
 “If we ignore these developments, we will be pushed out of important segments of the business,” he said. 
 
 A spokesman for Airbus declined to say how much the company was investing in urban mobility. ||||| Pay no attention to the man with the flying car. 
 
 It has been 11 months since the aviation giant Airbus, through its Silicon Valley branch A3, launched Project Vahana—an effort to build the world’s first certified, commercial passenger aircraft with no pilot. On Monday, Airbus CEO Tom Enders told a tech conference in Munich that a prototype would be ready by the end of 2017. 
 
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 According to Reuters, Enders argued the vehicle, which would function as a taxi, will allow users to avoid gridlock on city roads. It could even save money on infrastructure, he said. “With flying, you don't need to pour billions into concrete bridges and roads.” As he tells it, the switch to airborne vehicles would be as significant as the development of underground subway systems 150 years ago. 
 
 Twenty-four hours later, the story was the fifth-most popular on Reuters and had been picked up by dozens of giddy content creators elsewhere. Sample headline from Yahoo: “Flying cars are real and Airbus is making them this year.” 
 
 There are a few problems with the breathless press coverage here. First of all, what Enders said wasn’t exactly news. A3 CEO Rodin Lyasoff wrote in September that a prototype, which looks like a bobsled with wings and propellers, would be ready by the end of 2017. More significantly, this month’s Airbus magazine story on the Vahana gives a lot of reasons to be skeptical. 
 
 Lyasoff has previously made the case for a “new generation of personal aerial vehicles,” prompted by urban transportation challenges as well as elements of technical progress that were “trending favorably,” including better batteries, low-cost flight control systems, and cheaper manufacturing processes. 
 
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 Just one thing is missing: “sense-and-avoid technology” to help the vehicles from smashing into things midflight. “That’s one of the bigger challenges we aim to resolve as early as possible,” Lyasoff told the company magazine. 
 
 Well … Yes. That does seem like it should be a top priority. (This is a major problem for drone-delivery schemes, too.) And more pedestrian obstacles stand between us and our flying car future. 
 
 Airbus is one of a dozen-plus companies working on “flying cars.” In June, Bloomberg Businessweek revealed that Google co-founder Larry Page had been secretly funding one aerial vehicle company for years and had invested in another. Massachusetts-based Terrafugia claims to be developing a "flying car” with a price on-par with high-end luxury cars. In March, the German manufacturer e-volo became the first company to fly a manned, fully electric “multicopter." 
 
 Airbus’ size and experience distinguishes it from these start-ups, as does its confidence that such vehicles are a solution to traffic problems in megacities like Cairo, Mumbai, and Tokyo. The company is trying, Lyasoff wrote in September, to “nurture an ecosystem that will help enable the vertical cities of the future.” CNN advertised the concept as “Uber-like air taxis.” (Uber, by contrast, imagines that long-distance trips and route underserved by ground transportation will be the likely first use of so-called VTOLs, or vertical take-off and landing aircraft.) 
 
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 The flying car is the quintessential undelivered promise of future—right up there with “where’s my jetpack?”—so it seems natural that the term has caught on to describe these propeller-driven entities. 
 
 But a child would readily identify these sketches not as cars but as hybrid helicopters. Most of them don’t have wheels. They use blades, not propulsion engines. They take off and land vertically. And so—provided manufacturers can get past the primary problem of flying robot vehicles smashing into buildings, people, power lines, and one another—it is to choppers, not to cars, that they should be compared. The question is not if we can take a cheap, everyday product and make it fly, but if we can take a big, loud, expensive, relatively dangerous, pain-in-the-ass flying machine and make it cheap, quiet, and safe. 
 
 Writing in Slate in 2013, Konstantin Kakaes observed the similarities between the drones of today and the helicopters of yesteryear: 
 
 As Samuel Solomon, the president of Northeast Airlines, told the Associated Press in 1943, “The helicopter has tremendous possibilities.” Solomon prophesied air taxi services in which helicopters picked up businessmen on a rooftop in Boston and dropped them off “on the roof of an office in downtown New York.” Helicopters would also be used for express air-mail services, he said… Of course, none of this came to pass, for one simple reason: Helicopters could do all of these things, but they could not do them cheaply or efficiently enough to displace other technologies.” 
 
 That's the same problem confronting vertical take-off and landing aircraft, before you even take into account tight regulations of airspace, privacy concerns, the provision of parking and landing facilities, and the fastidious maintenance procedures required of airborne vehicles. (Imagine a mechanic working on your car for 20 business days after every 400 hours of driving.) This report from Uber offers a pretty comprehensive summary of the obstacles.
– The future is now! Or, at least, by the end of the year, according to the CEO of Airbus. Reuters reports Tom Enders announced Monday that the company plans to test a prototype self-piloting flying car by the end of the year. He says Airbus has the "technological wherewithal" to make it happen and that they are currently in the "experimentation phase." Enders says the vehicle could be used like a ride-sharing app, help people avoid traffic, and save municipalities money on roads. Sounds pretty cool, but a number of naysayers are putting the brakes on our flying car fantasies. Slate points out Airbus admittedly hasn't figured out "sense-and-avoid technology"—or, in other words, how to keep its flying cars from smashing into stuff. And Jalopnik notes that current designs look less "flying car" and more "flying helicopter," which is slightly less exciting. Also, the whole flying car thing still needs FAA approval to become a reality, and that's probably not going to happen any time soon.