FLYING CAR SIMULATORS: THE FUTURE OF FLIGHT GAMES

The year is 2026. I do not own a flying car. Nobody does. Every magazine cover from my childhood promised that by now the sky would be full of Jetson-style commuter vehicles and I would be late to work because of traffic above the clouds. Instead I have a sensible hatchback and a Steam library full of flying car simulators. I have made peace with this.

Actually I have more than made peace with it. The games are better than the reality would be. Real flying cars would be regulated into oblivion, limited to 300 feet of altitude, tracked by a dozen apps, and run out of battery after 40 miles. The game versions let me fly a DeLorean into a billboard at 88 miles per hour and then respawn. I know which one I prefer.

This is a tour of the flying car game genre, which is bigger and weirder than you might expect. There are serious eVTOL training sims with real aerospace companies attached. There are Back to the Future fan projects that have been in development for fifteen years. There are thousands of Roblox games where kids fly neon hovercars through glass skyscrapers. And there are a couple of genuinely great combat games with hovering vehicles that nobody ever calls flying cars even though that's exactly what they are.

Let's get into it.

The Back to the Future problem

Every flying car conversation has to start here. The DeLorean DMC-12 with the hover conversion from Back to the Future Part II is the most recognizable flying car in popular culture, and it has poisoned every serious attempt at a real flying car by setting an impossible aesthetic standard. We do not want a quadcopter with a chair on it. We want the DeLorean. We want gullwing doors and a swooping red light bar and the tires rotating sideways.

The games have been catching up to this dream for decades. Back to the Future: The Game from Telltale had the hover DeLorean in brief sequences but never really let you fly it freely. The real flying car gameplay has come from mods and fan projects. There are GTA V mods that convert the Deluxo into a perfect hover DeLorean replica, complete with glowing wheels and the correct sound effects. You can fly it over Los Santos and pretend you're Marty McFly, which is exactly what I have done for many hours and will continue to do.

The best officially licensed flying DeLorean experience is probably Lego Dimensions, which is dead now because Lego killed the toys-to-life genre, but before it died you could send the hover DeLorean through portals into every Lego universe they had licensed. It was charming and weird and oddly free-roaming. It also came with a physical plastic DeLorean that converted between time periods, which my childhood self would have sold organs for.

If you want the authentic hover car fantasy today, you're looking at GTA mods, occasional cameos in nostalgic games, and the Deluxo in GTA Online which hovers but doesn't quite capture the DeLorean feel. The perfect Back to the Future flying car game does not exist. This remains the great unfilled gap in gaming.

Serious eVTOL simulators

Here is where things get genuinely interesting. While the fictional flying car has been stuck in development hell, the real aerospace industry has been building electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles for about fifteen years now. Joby Aviation, Archer, Lilium, and before them Kitty Hawk all built working prototypes. Some of them carry passengers. Most of them crash occasionally. All of them have tie-ins to simulation software because pilots need to train somewhere and the vehicles are too expensive to train on directly.

Kitty Hawk, before they folded, released Flyer simulator demos that let you experience their recreational eVTOL from a desktop. It was a simple sim, basically a flight trainer with hover controls, but it represented something real. For the first time you could fly a digital model of a vehicle you could actually buy. The Flyer got cancelled. The simulator is still floating around.

X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator have both picked up third-party eVTOL aircraft modules. You can fly a Joby S4 analog in X-Plane with freeware mods. The flight model is not perfect because the real Joby flight data is proprietary, but it gets the basic feel right. Vertical thrust, tilting rotors for forward flight, the transition between hover and cruise that is the hardest part of piloting any eVTOL. It's the closest thing we have to a real flying car driving experience, and it is weirdly satisfying in a way I did not expect.

The transition moment is what makes it great. You take off vertically like a helicopter. You climb. Then you tilt the rotors forward and the aircraft becomes a plane. You accelerate. The hover thrust becomes lift from wings. You're flying. When you arrive at your destination you tilt the rotors back and slow down and descend. It's a dance between two very different flight modes, and nothing else in aviation feels quite like it. Desktop sims capture this better than you'd expect.

If you want to go deeper on the sim side of real aviation, we wrote a whole guide to the best plane simulator games that covers everything from study-level sims to hobby-tier options.

Harrier jets and the jump jet lineage

Before eVTOLs became the face of vertical flight, there was the Harrier. The AV-8B Harrier II and its Sea Harrier cousin are technically jet fighters but they are also the closest thing the military has to a flying car. They hover. They take off vertically. They land like helicopters but then fly like planes. Generations of flight sim players have tried to master the Harrier's unique control scheme and most have failed.

Digital Combat Simulator's AV-8B module is the deep end of Harrier simulation. You manage the nozzle angle as a separate control axis. You manage fuel weight because the Harrier can only hover if it's light enough. You manage ground effect because hovering close to the ground is different from hovering high up. It is one of the hardest modules in DCS and also one of the most rewarding because when you nail a vertical landing on a carrier deck in crosswinds you feel like a genuine military pilot.

The arcade side has Harriers too. Ace Combat games have let you fly Harriers for decades. Project Wingman has hovering VTOL sections. Even the old Jane's USAF had a Harrier campaign that punished you mercilessly for coming in too hot on the hover. The jump jet is to flight games what the Porsche 911 is to racing games. It's a vehicle with a personality. It demands respect. When you finally understand it you feel like a better pilot for the rest of your life.

The Harrier scratches the flying car itch in a weird way because it does the thing we actually want flying cars to do. Park vertically. Take off from anywhere. Land in a parking lot. No runway required. If flying cars ever become real, they will work like a smaller, quieter Harrier. The Harrier is the ancestor.

The Roblox flying car empire

I need to talk about this because if you have kids you already know. Roblox is absolutely drowning in flying car games. Search "flying car" on Roblox and you will get thousands of results. Flying Car Simulator. Flying Car Tycoon. Car Flying Simulator. Fly Your Car Simulator. Every possible word ordering has been claimed by somebody's six-month project.

These games are all basically the same. You get a car. The car can fly. You fly around a city that is one-third Los Angeles, one-third anime neon, and one-third whatever the developer thought looked cool. You pick up coins. You upgrade your car. Your car gets faster and flies higher. Eventually you have a purple Lamborghini with rocket boosters that can reach orbital altitude and outrun helicopters.

I say this with no judgment. These games are delightful. My nieces and nephews play them constantly and they are having the time of their lives. The controls are simple, the physics are forgiving, the progression is dopamine-maximized, and the flying feels free in a way that serious sims deliberately avoid. If you are eleven years old and you want to fly a car, Roblox is a utopia.

Some standouts have actual production value. Car Crushers 2 includes flight modes on certain vehicles and lets you destroy them spectacularly when you crash. Vehicle Simulator has hovercars as endgame unlocks with actual flight physics rather than just "car but y-axis goes up". Flying Car Racing uses a combat arena format with weapons. These are not going to win simulation awards but they are the pure joy flavor of the flying car fantasy and they're doing it for an audience that doesn't care about realism.

The Roblox flying car genre is a reminder that the dream of flying cars is fundamentally a kid dream. It's not about efficient transportation. It's about flying. The grown-up sims add realism because adults want justification for their fun. Kids don't need justification. They just want to fly the car.

Hovering transport in the broader genre

Step back from explicit flying cars and a much bigger genre emerges. Hover vehicles. Grav tanks. Speeder bikes. Floating boats. Any game where your ground vehicle is not actually on the ground.

WipeOut is the granddaddy of this genre. Anti-gravity racing ships that behave like flying cars in everything but silhouette. The physics are basically what a flying car would feel like if you stripped out vertical control and just let it drift. The Wipeout series is one of the best things the PlayStation ever produced and Omega Collection is still playable today. Redout and Pacer are the modern carriers of the torch.

Star Wars Battlefront's speeder bike sections are flying car gameplay. You're hovering low over terrain at high speed, weaving between trees, dodging obstacles. Same vibe as a low-altitude flying car chase. Star Wars Squadrons and various Star Wars racing games have taken this further with X-Wings and podracers that are basically flying cars with prettier shells.

Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen both have surface vehicles that can hover and fly in limited ways. Surface Recon Vehicles in Elite let you do low-altitude traversal of planets at speed. The SRV isn't a flying car exactly but it behaves like one on low-gravity worlds, which is as close as hard sci-fi ever gets to the flying car fantasy.

Then there's the Halo Warthog, which technically doesn't fly, but there is a Warthog Hornet and a Wasp that do. The Banshee from the Covenant side is basically a flying jet ski. Halo 5's Ghost variants include gravity-defying versions. Half the vehicle roster in modern Halo is functionally flying cars.

The point is that flying cars are everywhere if you stop requiring them to look like cars. The genre is vast. The aesthetic is what varies.

The gap between sim and reality

Here's the thing that hit me while writing this. The games are better than the reality.

Real flying cars, when they finally arrive at scale, will be boring. They will be regulated to specific corridors. They will have speed limits. They will require licenses that cost tens of thousands of dollars. They will be battery-limited to short hops. They will not fly over cities because the noise regulations will forbid it. They will not hover in front of your house because your neighbors will sue. The first generation of commercial eVTOL taxis is already live in Dubai and a handful of test cities, and the experience is basically an expensive helicopter ride that you book through an app.

The games are not limited by any of this. In the game version the flying car goes where you want. It does what you want. It hovers wherever. It flies as fast as the engine can render. It never runs out of battery unless the designer thought that would be fun. It doesn't require a license. It doesn't need infrastructure. It is the pure fantasy of the flying car without the practical reality clawing it down.

This is why the genre will survive the arrival of real flying cars. In fact the real flying cars will probably make the games more popular, because once people actually try the real thing they will realize that the fantasy is what they wanted all along. The fantasy lives in the games. The games will keep delivering it long after every other Joby shuttle is packed full of commuters complaining about the altitude limits.

What I actually recommend

If you want to fly a realistic eVTOL, get X-Plane with a Joby S4 freeware mod. It's the closest thing to driving a real flying car that exists.

If you want to fly a Harrier, DCS AV-8B Night Attack if you're patient or Ace Combat 7 if you want fun.

If you want to fly the DeLorean, GTA V with the right mods will get you closer than any official product ever has. Check the Nexus Mods listings for hover DeLorean conversions.

If you are a kid, or have a kid, Roblox. Any flying car Roblox game. They are all fine. The kids will sort themselves.

If you want the broader hover aesthetic, Wipeout Omega Collection or Redout 2. Neither is a car per se but both deliver the feeling.

And if you just want to fly, in the general sense, we have a rundown of the best arcade flight games that covers the genre from every angle.

The flying car, the real one, is coming eventually. The pilot certifications are being issued, the vehicles are being certified, the infrastructure is being built. But the games got there first, and they got there better, and they don't require a battery charge or a landing pad or permission from the FAA. They just require a controller and the will to pretend.

I am pretending right now. I am flying the DeLorean over a city that does not exist. It feels pretty good.