“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.”
Cybertrucks in the sky
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, 2025
Can Musk pull it off? We’re not going to hold our breath.
The history of flying car promises
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.
... continue reading