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Few sci-fi movies are as venerated as Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner," a movie that puts cyberpunk and science-fiction black on the big screen for the first time.
The film suggests bold predictions for the year 2019, including snakes on the verge of extinction, completely human androids, incessant rain in Los Angeles, and space colonies.
But the film also has some good things. LA's pyramid-shaped horizon implies that skyscrapers in the city are no longer legally required to have helipads on the roof – which actually changed to LA in 2014 – and the film predicts also the rise (no pun intended) of flying cars. An implicit part of the universe of "Blade Runner" is the Spinner, a flying car that we see darting in the city.
Flying cars are part of our "promised future" since the 1950s. And engineers have tried. Oh, how they tried. Among the many attempts to steal cars, there was the 1947 ConvAirCar Model 118, barely more than a winged car, and the Boeing 1990s Sky Commuter. And the inventor Paul Moller has spent his whole life developing various versions of his Sky Car, a reliable support for the latest pages of pop science magazine for decades.
And although we do not have flying cars yet, they are definitely coming. A number of companies are preparing what is essentially "passenger drones" – electric, autonomous, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles that look like oversized drones.
And they can carry passengers without the need of a driver. Boeing, AirBus and the Chinese company eHang all develop flying taxi services on oversized drones. Some are barely operational (in theory) and Uber has already announced the first five cities to start flying.
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