Top 10 Books and Movies That Featured Flying Cars 

The future might be running late, but it’s no longer imaginary. A car that drives on the road and flies is no longer fictional.

On October 15, 2026, Alef Aeronautics released footage of its electric flying car going over a Tesla Roadster. The company says it was the 1,000th logged flight. 

Limited deliveries of the Model A to early customers are planned before the end of the year, starting at about $299,999. Those first cars are meant for controlled real-world testing, not the flying-car free-for-all Hollywood has been promising for decades.

Watch the clip, and you get the feeling you’ve seen it before. 

And you probably have. Writers and filmmakers sorted out flying cars long ago, well before engineers had to think about vertical take-off, regulation, or what Lagos traffic would do once it left the ground. 

Some of their cars were sleek, some were silly, and one ran on magic. 

In The Fifth Element, they even got stuck in jams.

Here are ten books, films, and shows that featured flying cars. 

1. The House of Many Worlds (Sam Merwin Jr., 1951)

By the early 1950s, flying cars were already a science fiction staple. Merwin’s novel stands out because the car isn’t background scenery. It plays a real part in the story. The idea had moved on from “one day cars will fly” to “what happens when they do?” 

In this book, the answer is adventure.

2. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Ian Fleming, 1964)

Fleming is famous for James Bond, but he also wrote one of children’s fiction’s best-known flying cars. The book follows an eccentric car with a growing list of tricks, including flight. 

The 1968 film did more than the book to fix the image in people’s heads: a beautiful car, a family adventure, and the discovery that roads are optional. 

The concept wasn’t new by then. The film just made a flying car feel less like an engineering problem and more like something you’d want in your garage.

3. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick, 1968)

Dick’s future is far less cheerful. Flying vehicles exist, but nobody treats them as a reward for human progress. They’re plain infrastructure in a society dealing with ecological collapse and artificial humans. 

Science fiction loves this move. 

Hand people the technology that was supposed to fix life, then show them still miserable. 

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner later carried the idea to the screen and gave those vehicles their most famous look.

4. Blade Runner (1982)

If Chitty Chitty Bang Bang made flying cars charming, Blade Runner made them cool. 

Scott’s Los Angeles is wet, crowded, and lit by neon ads, with police Spinners cutting between the skyscrapers. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum counts the Spinners among the film’s defining visions of the future. 

The story is set in 2019. That year came and went with no Spinners. We got smartphones instead, so maybe we backed the wrong project. 

The Spinners return in Blade Runner 2049, where they’re about the only enviable thing in a bleak world.

5. Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Image credit: American Collectors Insurance

This is the one most people picture. 

Marty McFly travels to 2015, a future where cars have decided roads are beneath them. 

Doc Brown’s DeLorean flies through a sky full of other vehicles. 

2015 arrives, and all we get are hoverboards that are mostly glorified scooters. 

The DeLorean is still one of cinema’s best-known flying cars because it matches the future we were promised as kids: faster, stranger, and more fun.

6. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling, 1998)

Not every flying car needs advanced technology. Sometimes magic does the job. 

After missing the train to Hogwarts, Harry and Ron escape in Arthur Weasley’s enchanted blue Ford Anglia. 

It works because an ordinary family car becomes absurd. A Ford Anglia shouldn’t fly, and that’s why it’s funny. 

It’s also a slightly battered family car, not a sleek machine from the year 3000, so the idea feels oddly within reach.

7. The Fifth Element (1997)

Here, everyone gets one. Luc Besson’s 23rd-century New York has flying cars filling the sky above a vertical city, and that sky is no calmer than a street. 

It has traffic lights, lanes, jams, and taxis. 

One taxi driver, Korben Dallas, spends much of his working day shouting at other drivers while dodging buildings. Besson understood something about progress. Give humans flying cars, and they’ll find a way to make the commute annoying.

8. Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002)

Coruscant is a planet-sized city that treats flying vehicles as routine. Air taxis weave between enormous skyscrapers while traffic streams through layer after layer of the city. Unlike in Back to the Future, nobody gawks. That’s what makes it interesting.

A technology has become normal when people stop celebrating it and start complaining about it. Coruscant has plenty to complain about.

9. Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer, 2016)

Palmer’s Terra Ignota series is set in the 25th century, where extremely fast automated flying vehicles have reshaped transport. The effects go well beyond shorter commutes. 

Distance matters less, borders look stranger, and political systems have to adapt to a world where you can work on one continent and have lunch on another. This is the real question behind the flying-car fantasy. 

Picture a flight from Port Harcourt to Lagos replacing the road trip. Housing, work, cities, business, and even borders suddenly become negotiable.

10. The Jetsons

Strictly speaking, it’s neither a book nor a movie, so this entry cheats. But writing about flying cars without the cartoon that made them look ordinary would be odd. 

George Jetson doesn’t wake up amazed that people have conquered personal air travel. He goes to work. 

That may be the longest-lasting flying-car fantasy of all: the assumption that flying will one day be as boring as driving.

For decades, fiction showed flying cars as inevitable. Engineers built prototypes. Inventors folded wings into cars. Futurists kept asking where they were. 

A 2021 book titled Where Is My Flying Car? takes that missing technology as its starting point to ask why the promised future never arrived.

Now something close to it is showing up. 

It isn’t the crowded skies of The Fifth Element, Doc Brown’s DeLorean, or the casual commute of The Jetsons. But a car that drives on the road, lifts off vertically, and flies is no longer fiction. 

The future may be running late, but it’s no longer imaginary.