Few sci-fi movies are as revered as Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner," a film that put cyberpunk and sci-fi noir on the big screen for the first time.
The movie goes big on audacious predictions for the year 2019, including snakes on the verge of extinction, fully humanlike androids, ceaseless rain in LA, and space colonies.
But the movie got a few things right, too. The pyramid-shaped LA skyline implies that the city's skyscrapers are no longer legally required to have helipads on the roof â something that changed for real in LA in 2014 â and the film also predicted the rise (no pun intended) of flying cars. An essential part of the "Blade Runner" universe is the Spinner, a flying car we see darting about the city.
Flying cars have been part of our "promised future" since the 1950s. And engineers have tried. Oh, how they've tried. Among the many attempts at flying cars, there has been the 1947 ConvAirCar Model 118, little more than an auto with wings, and 1990's Sky Commuter from Boeing. And inventor Paul Moller spent his life developing various versions of his Sky Car, a reliable fixture in the back pages of pop science magazine for decades.
And while we don't have flying cars quite yet, they're definitely, at long last, coming. A number of companies are readying what are essentially "passenger drones" â electric powered, self-flying, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles that look like oversized drones.
And they can ferry passengers without the need for a pilot. Boeing, AirBus, and Chinese company eHang are all developing oversized drone flying taxi services, and some are just a couple of years (in theory) from operation, and Uber has already announced the first five cities that may start flying.