When you say it like that, it sounds better in some ways and worse in others.

It’s like saying we need traffic police and highways before we can have cars.

These things exist now, so we’re going to need to address their use or ban them and have our country fall behind in technology and manufacturing. Other countries are making them, if we’re not building similar industries then we’re losing.

Sure, a person might have said that. They'd have been right about the danger but wrong about our risk tolerance. It's hard enough to keep people from becoming water balloons in a simple collision on the ground (though things have definitely improved in that regard over the past century). It's also a much bigger problem to run out of fuel or have an engine failure in midair than on the ground in the vast majority of situations.

So they're like... low-altitude helicopters?

I know a guy that's a pilot and while 90% of his flying is leisure, he'll sometimes fly down to France for his vacations etc in one. Doesn't own them though, has to pay rentals.

We don't have flying cars because people are fucking dumb, and because the viable options are loud as hell.

We absolutely have the technology, and if there were a drive to make it affordable there would be more significant research into doing so.

To do a flying car, you need to simulate friction in the air, with significant enough force to prevent colision, while also maintaining low enough noise pollution to be acceptable to the average citizens. This second part is why we don't have Personal helicopters, despite aircraft being relatively affordable (in my cursory search I found two Helicopters less than 200K, one barely more than 100k, if there were significant drive to make them mainstream for the public they'd presumably be much cheaper, benefitting from economies of scale.)

Additionally, how do we as a society handle ATC for flying cars? Emergency stops? Impromptu repairs? Birds in the props‽

I'm not trying to naysay the retrofuturistic image we all want for the world. I am saying it probably shouldn't include flying cars. Especially if they're just Personal quadcopters.

I don't know about your definition. The term comes from a two-wheeled chariot it seems (though the etymology of that seems to be a word meaning "to run"). It's been used from everything from chariots, to train cars, to street cars, to automobiles. They all share two things in common. They're an enclosed container meant to carry things, and they've got wheels.

I don't think the wheel thing is fundamental to the definition anymore. Anything traveling on the ground is going to have wheels. The "flying" part let's you know how it travels, the car part informs you about the utility. I think it's perfectly clear what it means. What else should we call it that'd be more clear?

The marketing does all the heavy lifting

Does it though)

Go back to your hole.