As we have learned through the harsh tutor of experience, you can give people the past, the present, and above all else the future, and no matter what, they will still demand flying cars. We're getting there! Closer every day! And not always safely. It's understandable, this earthbound contempt for beloved vehicles that can't fly yet. Even retro-tech of a highly prescient variety is no salve. And so, onward (upward?) to the commenter of the day.
Were we aware that this long-held ambition for liftoff would again manifest itself when today we dug up some tattered prototypes for hybrid and electric cars? No, but we should have seen commenter BZR's, comment a-comin':
Yeah, well can these things fly? I'm still waiting for my nuclear-powered hovercar to the moon that we were promised to have by 1980. It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
Indeed, BZR, we share your disgust. Nothing new, however. We all wanna fly, and the need to overcome the conspiracy against has deep roots. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins captured the urge well in 1918 when he wrote: "I whirled out wings that spell/And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host./My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,/Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,/To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace."