> You might as well call helicopters "flying cars."
Which is exactly what people do in reply to the question, "where are our promised flying cars?". They exist, they're called helicopters.
The one criterion this does not meet, that's often hiding implied in the word "car", is "car as in private car ownership in United States". This will never fly (excuse the pun) with flying vehicles, because not many would be willing to go through enough training to be able to operate an aircraft safely. Most drivers don't even get adequate training to operate their own cars safely (drivers' license requirements are a joke), and piloting takes at least an order of magnitude more than that.
(And that doesn't even touch maintenance, which most drivers don't do, and a good fraction of those are willing to spend extra money to get their broken cars stamped as road-worthy.)
Which is why human-piloted helicopters and self-flying passenger drones are the closest we're going to get to "flying car" anytime soon; physics and human stupidity precludes anything else.
And your assertion about the meaning of "car" is absurd. The meaning, which is profoundly missing in VTOLs, is a vehicle that you can drive around on ROADS, on WHEELS. Nobody cares about the private ownership. They care about rolling it down the street.
Which is exactly what people do in reply to the question, "where are our promised flying cars?". They exist, they're called helicopters.
The one criterion this does not meet, that's often hiding implied in the word "car", is "car as in private car ownership in United States". This will never fly (excuse the pun) with flying vehicles, because not many would be willing to go through enough training to be able to operate an aircraft safely. Most drivers don't even get adequate training to operate their own cars safely (drivers' license requirements are a joke), and piloting takes at least an order of magnitude more than that.
(And that doesn't even touch maintenance, which most drivers don't do, and a good fraction of those are willing to spend extra money to get their broken cars stamped as road-worthy.)
Which is why human-piloted helicopters and self-flying passenger drones are the closest we're going to get to "flying car" anytime soon; physics and human stupidity precludes anything else.