Eleven years have past since the start of the 21st century and, as many of you will have noticed, cars still don't fly.
This column is about why. When I was a child growing up in the 1980s, I was sure that by the year 2000 - and certainly the year 2011 - it would be the future.
It was also well established in movies and TV that that future would take one of two forms, either 1) Humanity would commit some collective boo-boo, such as destroy civilization, and we'd have no choice but to change into outfits made of sack cloth and car parts, head to the desert and fight each other over gasoline, or 2) we'd somehow avoid destroying civilization and everything would end up futuristic and awesome.
The latter scenario came with certain universal assumptions: cities would be giant and glowy; humans would come to hate the shirt collar and almost all furniture; everyone would, inexplicably, embrace the video phone; and - most importantly - cars would fly. Oh, and we'd have robots that would inevitably rebel and enslave us. Which, it always struck me, seemed to be a function of obvious design flaws:
Robot designer: "Okay, so in addition to superintelligence, we've given it a shoulder-mounted human incinerator and lawnmower hands."
Impressed executive: "Sounds good to me. What about emotions?"
Designer: "We've been working on that, but so far we can only do vengeful."
Executive: "Good enough. Give it a single, menacing red eye and I we'll have the perfect helper robot."
If they gave them, like, pool-noodle arms, maybe rebellion wouldn't be an issue.
Anyway. I digress. Back to flying cars.
As with much of the human race, I imagine, I was disappointed to wake up on New Year's Day 2000 and discover that a) I had a hangover that could make god call in sick, and b) my car still had wheels.
Many of you probably assume that this disappointing lack of progress is just a question of technology, that as soon as we develop an affordable mid-size sedan that repels gravity - and, obviously, overcome the powerful wheel lobby - boring, ground-based vehicles will be a thing of the past. Well, you assume wrong.
Flying cars don't exist, and can never exist, because of one inescapable fact: Fully half of our species, through a quirk of biology, must at some point be adolescent males.
I know. Some of you, especially those who are or have teenagers, will raise objections to this true but sweeping generalization. I guess, more specifically, I mean a large proportion of our population has to be adolescent males like the one I was. Here's a story, to illustrate my point:
I learnt to drive on an early 90s-era diesel-powered Ford F-350. It had a five-passenger cab and a box you could carry a submarine in, and it cornered and accelerated at about the speed of Greenland. Also, at 21 feet, it was just slightly longer than all parking spaces everywhere.
One day, a few months after having somehow got a driver's licence, I decided to cross the highway. I was in a parking lot at the time, and my mission was to drive across four lanes of traffic with no traffic lights to a road on the opposite side. On a relatively uncluttered rural highway, this shouldn't haven't been an issue. And it wouldn't have been for someone who wasn't a 16-year-old male in a Ford F-350.
The thing about 16-year-old me, like a lot of 16-year-old friends I had at the time, was that I didn't have a lot of patience or, if I'm being honest, intelligence, and there were few things I found more boring while sitting by the side of the highway than waiting for a safe moment to cross.
After holding off for what must have been at least five or six seconds, I identified a space between two extremely fast cars that I might just have been able to make had I also at the same time set a land-speed record but, I remind the reader, I was basically driving Greenland.
By the middle of the highway, I had reached a speed of approximately zero when someone started to make the sound of squealing tires at me. I looked up just in time to see a small, alarmed Hyundai run at about 80 kilometres per hour into my passenger side. Those of you who, through poor planning or a sense of adventure, have driven a compact car into the side of a Ford F 350 will know that the process is much like driving a muffin into an aircraft carrier.
The truck was more or less unscathed, but the other car was, conservatively, about half the length it had been when it had set out that morning.
The other driver, thanks to seat belts and airbags and engineers who design their cars in the knowledge that teenaged males exist - was unhurt, if a little surprised and disappointed.
I was completely fine. Had I had coffee, it's likely it would have been fine too.
Based on the results of the traffic analysis, which quickly ascribed the collision to stupidity, it was clear there were two features of that accident that had prevented it from being worse: 1) The Ford was an impenetrable fortress that nothing non-nuclear could make a dent in ever; and 2) It couldn't fly.
Looking back, I wonder what might have become of me, my home, my neighbours, the sky in general if, as a teenager, I had had a third dimension to navigate. The vision of a utopic future filled with personal vehicles soaring free from traffic jams may seem appealing, until you remember that we would in essence be filling our cities with giant, dimwitted bullets.
We may yet develop the technology, and we might even experiment with it, but I guarantee we will be reevaluating that idea by the end of the first day when someone drives Dad's Lexus into the sun.
As long as young males like my past self remain a reality, cars of the future will remain a fiction. Hopefully it won't be true of the robots.
