Flying cars won't happen anytime soon because of 2 reasons. They're basically aircraft, which equals at least a private pilot's license, and they're meant to be flown INSIDE big cities. Even if we don't consider all the FAA regulations for flying OVER any big agglomeration, there is still the fact that once the engine quits, you're going down, unless you have another engine just for that particular situation. If you have wings, you can glide a bit, but you still have to land. However, as far as I know, cities don't have conveniently placed runways and fields every 2 or 3 blocks. This means that the aircraft will crash, probably killing the occupants, some bystanders and cause damage to the nearby area. Now most of you are thinking that this would not happen since we would have a redundant engine or whatever. Well, there are lots of scenarios that you make a redundant engine completely useless, most of them would have to do with the fuel system. For example: No more fuel in the tanks or there are contaminants (such as water) in the fuel. All this would mean that to be able to fly a flying car you would need to be highly skilled, highly trained and pay a lot of insurance money. Also the machine itself would need a lot of redundancy and maintenance to be considered airworthy. So the flying car would probably cost more money by the hour than your average helicopter (which is a lot). And by the way, autopilots don't FLY the airplane, they just point it's nose in the good direction, pilots still do most of the job and all of the decision making.
