When Peter Thiel lamented in 2011 that "we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters," he tapped into a persistent tech-world nostalgia. But as someone who has spent countless hours aboard what are effectively flying buses—commercial airliners—I can attest that the thrill of flight quickly fades into routine. Passengers draw their shades, bury themselves in screens, and count minutes until landing. If we had personal flying vehicles, the novelty would likely evaporate just as fast.
This is the backdrop for J. Storrs Hall's Where Is My Flying Car?, a book that has become something of a bible for a mindset I call "engineerism." I first coined that term in college, noticing that engineering students approached problems differently than physics majors. Engineerism, as I define it, is the conviction that if a technology can be built, it ought to be built—and that society's failure to do so is a kind of moral failing.
Hall, a nanotech researcher, extends this logic to four technologies: flying cars, cold fusion, advanced nanotechnology, and nuclear fission. His argument is that overregulation, scientific groupthink, and cultural timidity have robbed us of these marvels. He even coins the "Machiavelli Effect" to describe how vested interests allegedly suppress promising research that threatens their own paradigms.
The cold fusion problem
Take cold fusion, the most controversial of Hall's examples. In 1989, two chemists claimed to have achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature—a result that would have revolutionized energy. But repeated attempts to replicate the effect, including well-funded projects by the Japanese government, Toyota, the Electric Power Research Institute, and even Google, have all failed to produce consistent evidence of fusion. Some anomalies have surfaced, but nothing close to a usable energy source.
Hall dismisses these failures as the result of a closed-minded scientific establishment. Yet the history suggests otherwise: multiple independent, well-resourced efforts from different countries and sectors have tried and come up empty. That is not conspiracy; that is science working as it should. The occasional anomalies are interesting, but they do not amount to cold fusion.
The book's real value lies not in its technological predictions but in what it reveals about the engineering mindset. Engineerism prizes linear thinking, back-of-the-envelope calculations, and a can-do attitude. Those traits have built bridges and microchips. But they also lead to a blind spot: the assumption that the only barriers to progress are bureaucratic or cultural, rather than physical or economic.
Consider the flying car itself. The technical challenges are immense—safety, noise, energy density, traffic management—but even if solved, the economics would likely confine such vehicles to the ultra-rich. The rest of us would still be on commercial flights, which are already a marvel of coordination and safety. The engineerist dream often ignores the mundane realities of cost and scale.
Hall's book is a useful corrective to the opposite error—the belief that technology has stalled. In fact, we have seen extraordinary advances in computing, communications, and medicine. What we lack is not ingenuity but the willingness to accept that some technologies are not worth building, or that their time has not come.
This debate resonates beyond Silicon Valley. In Asia, where governments are pouring billions into everything from Japan's fiscal stimulus to Indonesia's currency defense, the question of which technologies to prioritize is a live policy issue. South Korea has invested heavily in urban air mobility, while China is pushing electric vehicles and high-speed rail—not flying cars, but practical alternatives that deliver mobility at scale.
In the end, Where Is My Flying Car? is less a roadmap than a Rorschach test. For engineers, it validates their frustration with a world that does not always reward ambition. For the rest of us, it is a reminder that progress is not a straight line, and that some promises are better left unfulfilled. The next time you board a plane, take a moment to appreciate the ordinary abundance of safe, efficient air travel—and maybe keep the window shade up.
