Sometimes, an obvious truth is right in front of you, and it takes Stephen Colbert to make you realize it. On Friday, the late night host decided to take a closer look at flying cars and came to a pretty big conclusion: they all kinda suck.
“Oh thank God!,” Colbert exclaimed. “The flying car is here, I was afraid that douchebags were running out of things to buy.”
Colbert specifically shredded the Kitty Hawk Flyer, a single-seat “flying car” prototype developed with a whole lot of Google co-founder Larry Page’s money. The Kitty Hawk Flyer launched last week with a glossy commercial video that Colbert delightfully rips apart.
“It looks like a mini-trampoline had sex with the wienermobile!” Colbert exclaims upon seeing the Kitty Hawk Flyer. “If the commercial they showed us is any indication, it is going to revolutionize how rich people travel across a lake.”
Here’s the original commercial, in full, if you want to make up your own mind.
And here’s Colbert’s segment, which also features an endorsement of the freaky theory that the cars in Pixar’s Cars universe are sentient self-driving vehicles that murdered their human masters and absorbed their consciousness.
Jokes aside, Colbert is touching on something that no amount of shiny product demos can put to rest: flying cars just aren’t happening yet. The Kitty Hawk Flyer isn’t even remotely a car, it’s a big-ass drone with a motorcycle seat on top. Other firms, like the Israeli Urban Aeronautics, have more car-shaped designs, but aren’t really planning a dual-use vehicle so much as something that’ll eventually replace helicopters. Uber, too, dislikes the term “flying car,” and is focusing on a new generation of short-range vertical takeoff vehicles rather than something that can fly and drive on normal roads. Oh, and Elon Musk also thinks they’re a big waste of time, no matter how much people are willing to pay for them.
