You Can't Trust a Free Flying Car

Big news: a billionaire has just arrived at your door to offer you a free flying car.

It’s exciting, right? I mean, a flying car wasn’t something you particularly longed for, since you get around just fine with public transportation and/or your regular old road car. You were barely even aware of flying cars as a thing.

Sure, you’ve seen some movies where flying cars are connected to dystopia and it was really obvious to everyone that they were a bad idea…but those are just movies.

Anyway, having a flying car is going to make your life so much easier and more convenient (even if you didn’t really know you needed that). You don't even have to go to a dealership; it's already here, parked two feet above your driveway, and it’s extremely cool and innovative and surely flying cars are the future. And this billionaire just decided to randomly gift one to you! All you have to do is sign on the dotted line and accept your free gift.

You’re probably so excited that you’re not even going to wonder why a billionaire would go to all the trouble of creating flying cars just to give them away for free. Why look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

But that’s where I come in. I'm a member of the Anti-Flying Car Resistance, and I’m here to ruin your fun/ make sure you know what you’re getting into.

See, there are a few things you really ought to know about the flying car industry –things that the billionaire won’t tell you and doesn’t want you to know. Before you get behind the wheel and into the skies, let’s make sure you’ve got all the information, okay?

The first thing you should know is that the flying car you’ve been offered was built out of stolen parts.

In order to make their flying cars without spending much money, that billionaire and his billionaire friends went to a black market site and gathered a whole bunch of parts that had been stolen from regular, non-billionaire people.

Those people – the makers– they’d trained for years to build car parts. They prided themselves on creating quality products and selling them for people to use and enjoy, which is sort of the whole point of this capitalism thing. But those parts were stolen and placed on the black market, where billionaires happily scooped them up for free, even though they could afford to pay for the parts, and even though that shit is illegal. The billionaires used the stolen parts to create the first Flying Car Factory, and now they don’t need the parts anymore.

The makers never got paid for their work, and last I heard, a lot of those makers aren’t doing so well. Many of them no longer make those quality products at all, for anyone. They can’t afford to, since the market for regular old car parts isn’t exactly booming these days. Because they spent years, maybe their entire adult lives, training to do this one thing, a lot of them are well and truly screwed.

Learning that the shiny, exciting new flying car parked outside my house was built out of stolen parts would be enough for me to not accept it as a free gift, especially because I am one of those makers.

But maybe you’re fine with it. You might have heard that the makers have sued the billionaires, and they’re each (hopefully) going to be paid a small chunk of money to compensate for their losses, so it’s okay for you to accept this free flying car from the billionaire. Anyway, that was all in the past. It's not like anyone's stealing from creators now.*

Do you still want to accept the flying car knowing that every now and then, a flying car kills a teenager?

I’m not talking about a traffic accident or one-time engine malfunction; the flying car was operating exactly as it was made to. But flying cars are very new, and there are no real laws regulating the skies, which is how the billionaires want it. Our own president has actually taken action to prevent lawmakers from creating policies to protect flying car users, so the skies are really the Wild West these days. And sometimes, maybe five times a year, a flying car carrying a teenager or an emotionally fragile adult just…explodes. Like a glitch.

None of the billionaires are particularly interested in fixing this problem; they’re too busy convincing everyone to accept free flying cars.

Again, I’d probably draw my own line on the “sometimes causes the death of a child” caveat alone. But perhaps you’ve decided that five human lives a year is an acceptable price to pay for flying cars. You don’t know any teenagers, and you’re not emotionally fragile. I’m sure you’re not thrilled that they sometimes kill people, but the odds of this affecting you are itty bitty. It’s really such a small number of people being affected in the grand scheme of things, right?

Gross, but okay, fine: let’s go global. What if I told you that the flying car factories, let's call them hubs, burn through a tremendous amount of water and power, resources that are already growing scarce? In fact, those hubs require ten times as much electricity as a regular factory. Even turning on your flying car is the equivalent of throwing a single plastic bottle right into the ocean. You’d never bring a garbage bag of plastic bottles to the beach and start chucking them in one by one. Why would you use a product that does the same thing?

But maybe that environmental stuff is too abstract for you, or maybe you’ve decided the convenience and speed of a flying car is worth whatever happens to the planet. I mean, we’re already destroying it anyway, right? You might as well get to enjoy a flying car in the meantime. I mean, this car has a lot of bells and whistles, including automated features. Forget cupholders, this baby can pick up your groceries and cut your commute time by 90%. And the views.

What if I told you that although the flying car is free, it’s going to end up costing you more money than you have? The billionaire and his billionaire friends put a lot of capital into creating a lot of flying cars and getting them to the public very quickly. Yes, we all get flying cars for free (well, except those makers; they’ve essentially been forced to trade their future income for flying cars, but whatever, progress requires casualties), and the cars came with a full tank of Flying Car Fuel.

But the billionaires did all this because they’re hoping to get you, and everyone else on the entire planet, very, very hooked on flying cars.

If everyone is using free flying cars, no one will make regular cars anymore. There won’t be any mechanic shops to fix regular cars, and nowhere you can buy things like tires and brake fluid. We’ll all basically forget how to drive. Of course, cities will also stop funding public transportation, issuing licenses, and maintaining roads. All those workers, the mechanics and the bus drivers and the DMV employee and the construction workers, they’ll lose their jobs and have to find entirely new careers. The global economy and our way of living will shift in favor of flying cars.

By the time the billionaires’ investment money runs out, we’ll all be dependent on using flying cars for our lifestyle and livelihood. We’ll no longer have the infrastructure to live without them. The workers will have moved on to other careers, and it’ll be too late to get them back.

Right about then, the trap is going to spring. Flying cars are going to get very, very expensive to use. You may have heard about subscription services for Flying Car Fuel, but experts have suggested even that business model won’t be profitable for long. Instead, the billionaire and his friends are going to start charging you every single time you use your flying car…which you’ll have to do, since your whole way of life will now depend on it.

By this point, I really hope I’ve convinced you that accepting that flying car is a very bad idea. No matter how long that billionaire stands at your door shaking the keys, no matter how many ads or pop-ups or friendly little bots try to persuade you (several of them tried to persuade me just as I was posting this blog), you don’t actually have to use a flying car. Even if your friends drive them. Even if they’ve started using flying cars at work. You lived a lot of your life without a flying car, and honestly, you were probably better for it. We are just starting to understand what flying cars do to our brains and bodies, and it's already looking grim for skills like critical thinking and socialization.

So convenient.

Yes, flying cars are fast and convenient –but a lot of convenient things are actually quite terrible for us, and create problems we hadn’t foreseen. Disposable plastic is convenient, and now we have islands of plastic garbage

floating around our oceans.

Punching someone at the deli and taking their lunch instead of waiting in line to order your own is convenient, but we made that illegal that because civilization is important to having society. Sacrificing critical thinking, independence, and civilized regulation for convenience is going to be bad.

I’ve been paying attention to this flying car discourse for a while now, and the argument that makes me the angriest is the one I hear the most: “Flying cars are the future. You can’t fight progress. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

Honestly? It's probably true that we can’t just shut down all the flying car factories and make flying cars illegal and everything will go back to how it was. But we can ask questions of progress: who gets a flying car and who doesn’t? How will it be used? Forget what that billionaire is promising—in what direction will this new technology truly take us? Is that somewhere we want to go?

We can’t undo progress, but it’s not too late to demand ethical creation.

You want a flying car? Then refuse to accept the freebie in your driveway until there are traffic laws in the skies.

Insist that the billionaires do whatever it takes to prevent flying cars from exploding and killing vulnerable people. Demand that they make a business plan that puts as few people out of work as possible, and limits how much flying cars can cost us in the future.

Until you do all that, you don’t really know what deal you’re accepting. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that signing a deal with a billionaire without reading the fine print is not a good idea.

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*Except they are, because those AI tools built from stolen parts have become a shitty replacement for the work of actual artists and writers, and personally, I don’t think a small, one-time chunk of money makes up for the loss of a career, but you’re free to disagree.

Authors note: no AI was used in the writing, design, or posting of this piece. The images were created or selected by the author using Canva, for which the author pays a monthly subscription. No Canva AI features were used.