>Because people absolutely would have jumped at the chance to go from a place to another faster (and more comfortably) and had myriads of reasons to want to do so at any time in history.

The first cars were incredibly noisy, smelly, and actually killed a lot of folks. Yet somehow, here we are something like 100 years later, evaluating how many more years we'll have to wait before we can get go place to place without even having to touch a steering wheel.