A Flying Taxi Finally Nears Takeoff With an Unlikely Boost From Toyota

We all grew up with wide-eyed ideas of flying cars—you know, one day zipping around town like the Jetsons. Their failure to materialize so disappointed investor Peter Thiel that he quipped: “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.”

You’re free not to believe him, but JoeBen Bevirt is here to tell you we are now close—very close—to having flying cars.

Next year, Bevirt said, Joby Aviation, the electric air taxi startup he founded in 2009, will begin offering commercial passenger service in Dubai and possibly New York and Los Angeles. As evidence of his seriousness, Joby last month made a test flight in Dubai, and this week it announced it was doubling aircraft production capacity at its Marina, Calif., facility.

It’s early days, Bevirt said, but flying cars are about to be a genuine business. “We are perhaps akin to where automotive was in the 1890s,” he told me, “when we were still hand-building cars, and cars were produced in the tens and hundreds.”