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Chassis was a comic book series built around the sport of rocket car racing.In Cavewoman, Gramps had a flying motorcycle.The Batmobile itself became a flying car, as well as a submersible (!) in Frank Miller's All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder.In John Byrne's Superman & Batman: Generations, Clark Wayne as Knight-Wing operated a flying Batmobile.In Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin, Dick Grayson and Damien Wayne have a flying Batmobile.The Batcraft flown by Jim Gordon III, in the computer-generated cyberpunk Elseworld comic Batman: Digital Justice.Trinity Blood has an aerodynamics-challenged version.
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The AMP uses 'spinner' patrol cars and Rally has a flying limousine.
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Such vehicles are expensive, clunky to operate in either form, and not the least bit fuel-efficient. However, the idea has never gotten off the ground (pun intended) for the same reason combined baseball/football stadiums went out of style: their functional needs are so different, making something that does both only succeeds in making it lousy at both. There have been some real-life attempts at combining cars and aircraft, but rather than flying cars, they're better described as "road-able aircraft," basically small planes whose wings can be folded/removed so they can be driven on normal roads. It's also possible that with climate change now a primary concern, and with it the realisation that car emissions contribute a huge chunk to greenhouse gases, pollution and climate change effects, depictions of cars flying en masse may start to smack of environmental disregard, especially as less and less people today are opting to drive on-the-ground cars, in favour of takingor demanding, if they don't havemass public transit. The idea of flying vehicles being as common as cars in the future is still frequently used, but in modern works they're more likely to look like futuristic VTOL aircraft than actual cars that fly. Nowadays, this trope is rarely played straight, at least not in its most literal form.
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This is usually handwaved with some mention of an antigravity device. This would require some rather fanciful technology for a vehicle to get off the ground without wings or a rotor system in place. Otherwise you could say we already have them in the form of helicopters and small planes. When people think of flying cars, they generally mean a vehicle that looks, drives and behaves exactly like an automobile. The lack of flying cars in Real Life is a common complaint.
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