“It’s 2025 – where’s my flying car?” For generations, the flying automobile has been the ultimate symbol of a techno-utopian future perpetually just out of reach. From The Jetsons to Back to the Future, popular culture promised that by the 21st century, commuters would be zipping through the skies. In the 2010s, a wave of startups backed by big-name investors sought to finally deliver on this promise. Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, poured money into Kitty Hawk, a company building single-seat flying vehicles. Uber envisioned “flying taxis” and launched Uber Elevate, projecting aerial ride-sharing demos by 2020. Traditional aircraft manufacturers and automakers from Boeing to Toyota also jumped in, funding electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) prototypes. The hype soared high: we were told urban air mobility would ease traffic congestion, reduce travel times dramatically, and herald a new era of personal transportation – perhaps as soon as the mid-2020s.
Reality Check: As of 2025, the skies remain largely devoid of personal cars. Despite some impressive prototypes, flying cars are nowhere near mainstream use. Many ambitious projects have folded or scaled back. Kitty Hawk, for example, after 12 years of development in semi-secrecy, abruptly shut down in 2022 when it “couldn’t see a way forward” to a viable product. This was a striking setback: Kitty Hawk had produced several working eVTOL prototypes (like the Flyer and the later Heaviside), yet ultimately even a billionaire-backed effort conceded the dream was too hard to commercialize. Uber’s flying taxi dreams also didn’t materialize under its roof – Uber sold its Elevate division to Joby Aviation in 2020, effectively bowing out of the race to focus on its core business. As one automotive editor wryly noted, “Flying cars will always be a novelty. They will never be mainstream…you will never be able to park one in your backyard and fly off to work.” Harsh as that sounds, it reflects the consensus that the utopian vision is far from reality.
To be clear, technical progress has been made in this field. Dozens of companies worldwide are testing eVTOL aircraft that function as small airborne shuttles. Startups like Joby Aviation, Archer, Lilium, and Xpeng’s AeroHT have built and flown prototypes, and some have even received limited regulatory approvals for test flights. At the 2023 CES show, for instance, China’s Xpeng displayed its X2 flying car, a sleek two-seater drone-like vehicle that had completed a test flight in Dubai. Xpeng claims over 3,000 customers in China have placed deposits for an eventual flying car that costs around $275,000 apiece. Major automakers are partnering in these efforts too: Toyota invested $1 billion in Joby Aviation, Honda is developing a hybrid eVTOL concept, Hyundai is designing an air taxi for 2028, and companies like Porsche, GM, and Stellantis have all dabbled in airborne vehicle projects. The industry optimistically talks of launching the first commercial air taxi services by the late 2020s.
But these remain prototypes and pilot programs – a far cry from the mass-market personal flying car that hype would have had us believe we’d be using by now. All signs indicate that if flying cars do arrive, they’ll initially operate more like small planes or air taxis rather than something anyone can drive (or pilot) from their garage. The regulatory and safety hurdles are enormous. Aviation authorities like the FAA will require strict certification, and pilots (or highly reliable autonomous systems) to fly these vehicles. “Anything that gets off the ground will be regulated…and a pilot license will be required,” as one observer pointed out, noting you can’t simply have thousands of untrained commuters flitting over cities without chaos. The infrastructure challenge is also non-trivial – “flying cars” will need designated vertiports or at least open spaces to take off and land, not to mention air traffic management to prevent mid-air collisions. So even if the technology works, integration into society will be slow and careful.
What Went Wrong? In essence, the classic flying car vision collided with practical reality. Physics and engineering impose tough limits – making a vehicle that is both road-worthy and air-worthy forces compromises (weight, fuel/battery needs, structural complexity) that have proven exceedingly difficult. Most efforts have shifted toward purpose-built eVTOL aircraft that don’t also drive on roads, because the hybrid approach is inefficient. So the literal “car that flies” is being supplanted by “small electric aircraft” that may ferry people point-to-point above traffic. Those might succeed eventually, but they’re not the Jetsons-style commute many imagined.
There’s also the sheer cost and risk: Early flying cars/eVTOLs are very expensive to produce, and initial services will charge a premium. It’s not a solution for the masses, at least not for a long time. And as with any aircraft, accidents could be catastrophic. A minor engine failure in a plane or eVTOL can be fatal (unlike a car, you can’t just pull to the shoulder if something goes wrong at 1,000 feet in the air). The public and regulators have understandably little tolerance for the idea of thousands of novice pilots above our cities. Thus, progress has been cautious.
In summary, by 2025 flying cars remain more of a futurist fantasy than an everyday transport option. They illustrate how even century-old hype (people have dreamed of flying cars since at least the 1920s) can persist without materializing. Companies are still chasing the dream – and we may yet see limited air taxi deployments in select cities within a few years – but the widespread flying car future that hype promised is grounded in the foreseeable future. As TechBooky sees it, we were indeed promised flying cars, but this is one promise that keeps getting postponed, perpetually waiting for technology, economics, and regulations to align.
5G Wireless: Hype Overdrive, Modest Reality
Of all the recent tech rollouts, 5G mobile networks might have been one of the most overhyped to consumers. In the mid-2010s, carriers and tech pundits raved about 5G as a revolution in connectivity. We heard that 5G’s gigabit speeds and millisecond latency would enable everything from autonomous cars communicating in real-time, to surgeons performing remote surgery via VR, (we covered this in Part 1 of this series) to fully immersive metaverse experiences on the go. Industry marketing promised 5G would be 10-100 times faster than 4G and far more reliable – a true replacement for wired broadband. Cities imagined smart infrastructure with IoT sensors on every corner, all connected by 5G. The expectation was that by the early 2020s, 5G would blanket the globe and fundamentally change how we live, work, and play. Telecom giants spent billions on spectrum and infrastructure in anticipation of a huge payoff.
Reality Check: By 2025, 5G is indeed widely rolled out in many countries – but for most consumers, it hasn’t felt revolutionary. A candid assessment in Fierce Wireless noted that the 5G hype of the 2010s now looks “downright embarrassing to think back on.” Far from instantly transforming life, 5G’s impact on everyday users has been incremental. Yes, phones show a “5G” logo now and can get faster download speeds in some areas, but the experience is not the night-and-day leap that the marketing once implied. In fact, many consumers don’t even notice or care; “Consumers don’t care about 5G. They don’t even know if their phones are 5G-enabled,” observes Fierce Wireless. To the average person, 5G mostly means their YouTube or Netflix might buffer a bit less – hardly the sci-fi future that was sold.
The grand promised use cases are either still in pilot phases or have seen tepid uptake. Self-driving cars are “emerging slowly and haltingly” and certainly aren’t relying on ubiquitous 5G yet. The metaverse on the go? “Nobody’s interested in the metaverse,” that same industry piece dryly remarked. And remote robot surgery over 5G remains extremely niche (and some would say was always more PR stunt than practical need). Meanwhile, the financial boon for telecom operators hasn’t materialized as hoped. Carriers expected 5G to unlock new revenue streams and enterprise customers, but many are still struggling with debt from spectrum auctions and the costly build-out of 5G towers. “It would be easy to assume 5G is a failure,” the Fierce analysis notes, given the unmet expectations.
However, the story has nuances. The real-world impact of 5G, while not flashy, is emerging in specific areas. One surprise success has been Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) – basically using 5G to deliver home internet. In regions where laying fiber is expensive, carriers have used 5G towers to offer broadband to homes via wireless modems. This turned out to be a viable business, letting telecoms compete against cable ISPs. “FWA has become the shining star of 5G,” writes analyst Linda Hardesty, noting carriers realized they could harness 5G’s faster speeds and excess spectrum to win internet customers. In a 2025 survey of telecom executives, 43% named fixed wireless home broadband as the most important 5G use-case delivering results, far above trendy ideas like augmented reality. In other words, 5G found its footing in an unexpected way – not by enabling futuristic apps, but by providing plain old high-speed internet to more people.
For smartphone users, 5G’s benefits have been subtle. In some cities, 5G peak speeds are indeed dramatically higher than 4G, but those peak speeds often rely on mmWave signals that have extremely limited range (and thus are rare). Typical 5G on “mid-band” frequencies offers decent speed improvements – perhaps 2-3× 4G speeds – but not enough to change how most apps are used. The much-touted low latency of 5G (1-10ms) has been hard to experience in practice, as it requires end-to-end network upgrades that lag behind radio rollout. As a result, the consumer-facing “wow factor” is missing. A majority of telecom executives in the survey admitted 5G has had only limited success so far, with 60% saying it’s been modest and is a long-term play, and only 10% calling 5G “extremely successful” to date. Even the telecom industry acknowledges the hype was overblown and that patience is needed for 5G’s full potential to unfold.
What Went Wrong (and Right)? The initial mistake was framing 5G as a silver bullet for all manner of futuristic applications. Many of those applications either didn’t need 5G specifically or weren’t close to ready themselves (e.g. autonomous driving needed better AI and sensor breakthroughs more than it needed 5G coverage). This led to a mismatch: the 5G networks got built, but the “killer apps” to exploit their unique capabilities lagged behind. As TechBooky observed, 5G turned out to be more of an evolution than a revolution for consumers – a step up in network quality rather than a paradigm shift.
That said, 5G is not a “failure” so much as a tech that was overhyped on timing. Telecom innovations often take years to find the right applications. For instance, nobody predicted that network slicing (a 5G feature that lets carriers dedicate portions of bandwidth to specific services) would become relevant for enterprise until after 5G was deployed and businesses started experimenting. Now, some of 5G’s more advanced capabilities are slowly being utilized in areas like smart factories (private 5G networks on factory floors for robotic automation) and telemedicine pilots. These just aren’t visible to consumers. Meanwhile, the general public’s attention has moved on. “The 5G hype…has nearly died, replaced by intense interest in AI,” notes CIO magazine, adding that sketchy marketing and slow delivery soured many on 5G early.
In conclusion, 5G taught the industry a lesson in managing expectations. It’s a powerful networking upgrade that is enabling new services (like wireless home internet and industrial IoT), but it wasn’t a magical leap that instantly changed daily life by 2025. The hype promised too much too soon. Moving forward, as 5G matures and eventually leads into 6G research, both providers and users are calibrating to a more realistic understanding: big infrastructure shifts take time to translate into transformative outcomes. The 5G era is still young, and its story isn’t fully written – but its early years serve as a reminder that even when the technology works as advertised, the broader ecosystem needs to catch up for the promised revolution to be realized.
Self-Driving Cars: Driving on Hype, Stuck in Traffic
Few technological dreams captured the public imagination in the 2010s quite like self-driving cars. Tech executives and automakers confidently predicted that by the early 2020s, we’d have Level 4 or 5 autonomous vehicles (capable of driving with no human input) roaming our streets. In 2016, Tesla’s Elon Musk proclaimed a Tesla would drive itself across the country by 2017, and he repeatedly insisted fully self-driving taxis were just a year or two away. Traditional car companies were equally bullish: General Motors targeted 2019 for a large-scale autonomous fleet deployment, and Ford boldly announced it would deliver true self-driving cars (no steering wheel needed) for ride-hailing by 2021. Dozens of startups sprang up to develop self-driving tech, backed by enormous investment – Google’s Waymo, GM’s Cruise, Uber’s ATG, Ford and VW’s Argo AI, Toyota’s Pony.ai, and many more. The hype was that human drivers would soon be obsolete, eliminating accidents and ushering in a transportation revolution.
Reality Check: Here we are in 2025, and despite some impressive advancements, fully autonomous cars are not a part of daily life for the vast majority. Companies have found that getting a car to safely handle all the chaos of real-world driving is an incredibly hard problem. Elon Musk’s famous promise remains unfulfilled – nearly a decade on, Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system is still a Level 2 driver-assist that “requires human oversight and is riddled with safety concerns,” as CEO Today magazine pointed out bluntly. Tesla owners who paid thousands for “FSD” are effectively beta-testing a feature that, while advanced, still makes mistakes and has been involved in notable crashes. Regulators have cracked down on misleading claims, and there’s ongoing debate about whether Tesla’s approach will ever achieve true Level 5 autonomy without lidar or more robust sensing.
Traditional automakers have also pulled back. In late 2022, Ford and Volkswagen made the stunning decision to shut down Argo AI, their jointly funded self-driving startup, after investing billions. Ford’s CEO Jim Farley admitted that “profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off.” In a statement to investors, Farley conceded that Ford had underestimated the challenge, noting they originally aimed for Level 4 by 2021 but “things have changed.” Ford decided to write off $2.7 billion and refocus on more immediate driver-assistance tech (Level 2/3), essentially punting on near-term full autonomy. This was emblematic of a broader industry reality check: GM’s Cruise, while still pushing forward, delayed its early targets and has deployed only small test fleets in limited urban zones. Other players like Uber and Lyft exited their autonomy projects, opting instead to partner with the likes of Waymo and Motional for very limited robo-taxi trials. Waymo and Cruise do operate robotaxi services in parts of Phoenix, San Francisco, and a few other cities – but these are geofenced, carefully monitored programs, not widespread replacements for human drivers. As of 2025, if you hail a taxi or buy a new car anywhere in the world, odds are someone will be driving it – not a computer.
What Went Wrong? In short, the hype far outpaced the reality of AI and engineering capabilities. Building a reliable self-driving car turned out to be harder than expected on multiple fronts. The long tail of driving scenarios (rare events, complex urban interactions, poor weather conditions) proved incredibly difficult for AI to handle. Initial confidence was high because early demos in good weather on simple routes looked promising, but scaling to everywhere, all the time exposed how much edge-case knowledge human drivers actually use. As one former GM executive observed, when it comes to mission-critical safety systems, the move-fast-and-break-things mindset doesn’t cut it. Companies had to slow down and “graduate” their algorithms through millions of miles of testing, which is time-consuming and expensive.
Cost and business model issues also loomed. Many startups found themselves burning cash with no clear path to profitability. Argo AI, valued at $12 billion at one point, couldn’t attract new investors by 2022 precisely because the timeline to revenue kept stretching out. Robo-taxis were supposed to make money by replacing paid drivers, but getting them to work well enough has taken far longer than anticipated, delaying any return on investment. Meanwhile, simpler applications of autonomy in trucking and delivery are being explored, but even those face technical and regulatory hurdles (e.g. navigating highway safety for 80,000-pound driverless trucks).
Public trust and regulatory frameworks also play a role. High-profile crashes of Tesla’s Autopilot and Uber’s test vehicle (which killed a pedestrian in 2018) set back confidence and led to greater scrutiny. Regulators now demand rigorous safety validation, which slows deployments. Society seems not entirely ready to accept truly driverless cars mixing on busy streets without thorough proof of safety – and providing that proof is a tall order without real-world deployment, a classic chicken-and-egg scenario.
In summary, autonomy is advancing, but on a much more gradual trajectory. Level 2 and Level 3 driver assistance (where the car can handle some tasks under supervision) have grown common – many 2025 model cars offer features like highway lane-centering or traffic jam assist. But the jump to Level 4/5 is proving to be a long-term endeavour. TechBooky’s takeaway is that self-driving cars exemplify a case where AI and robotics hit complexity barriers that optimistic timelines failed to anticipate. As of 2025, the road to a driverless future is still under construction, with no clear ETA. The hype engine has quieted, replaced by a sober recognition: autonomous driving will come, but it’s evolutionary, not revolutionary. As Ford’s CEO put it, “We still believe in Level 4 autonomy…[but] we’ve learned it’s a long way off.” In the meantime, the grandiose visions of 100% self-driving streets have been put on hold, making this another prominent example of a tech promise that remains unfulfilled.
Paul Balo is the founder of TechBooky and a highly skilled wireless communications professional with a strong background in cloud computing, offering extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing wireless communication systems.
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