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Interestingly, the iRobot founder and brilliant robot scientist Rodney Brooks puts flying cars and robot taxis in similar buckets as to wide availability: http://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

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The reasoning for that is kinda thin. "I am pretty sure that practical flying cars will need to be largely self driving while flying, so they sort of fit the category." Essentially, because self driving technology is a necessary precondition for flying cars, flying cars are at least as difficult as self driving vehicles. There really isn't any argument for why flying cars aren't much more difficult than self driving vehicles.

At least there is little new construction in the air.

> There really isn't any argument for why flying cars aren't much more difficult than self driving vehicles.

On a software level Self-flying aircraft are much more simple than self-driving cars, there exist today technologies to have 100% safe self-flying vehicles similar to small electrical planes capable of 1 to 2 passengers, it's much more a regulation challenge.

I don’t believe that resilience against mechanical failure is a solved problem for flying cars yet. Flying a plane when everything is working isn’t particularly hard. Diagnosing and coping with partial failures is hard.

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