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I came here to talk about the subsidization of automobiles. We've spent 100 years building out a huge infrastructure for automobiles that makes them cheaper to get from A to B in most cases.
The flying car infrastructure is at zero (maybe they would benefit from being able to land in roads and park in driveways and such) but it's gotta be difficult to fully comprehend how difficult it is to compete against such infrastructure.
People may want a better keyboard than QWERTY, but the effort of learning a new keyboard never seems to be worth being able to type a little faster and so even our phones have QWERTY layouts. Does this mean consumers don't want it? I suppose so, but it also feels like that is a weak explanation for what is going on.
It's also hard to compete against legal prohibitions.
A lot of the retrofuturism I've read is from Asimov and Clarke. One of the most striking things is how strongly they expected hovercrafts to emerge as the personal vehicle of choice.
I wonder if there's a true impracticality there or if it's a result of heavily subsidizing the competition, as one of the main benefits of hovercraft was saving on infrastructure costs.