Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, November 4th. I'm Katie Dayton for The Wall Street Journal.

Today, we're checking in on one of the most anticipated inventions of our times, the flying car.

Let's just say it's not exactly what George Jetson was driving.

Then we fly over to northeast Oregon, where the building of Amazon data centers is beginning to transform the local economy.

But first, there aren't many modes of high-tech transport that capture the imagination

like the flying car,

and a new entrant from aircraft maker Pivotal feels even more futuristic than most.

Its electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, known as EVTOLs, are super lightweight and

include just one seat, and they look more like drones than cars or planes.

My colleague and WSJ reporter Bell Lynn spoke to the journal's auto columnist Dan Neal

about his experience test-flying the Pivotal's Blackfly vehicle.

Let's start by talking about what exactly these vehicles are.

How are the ultralight EVTOLs different from a helicopter?

It is an ultralight aircraft, and it is different from a helicopter in a lot of ways.

The helicopter is notorious as an invention for a couple of reasons. One, they're allowed.

Two, they have what's called a single point failure design so that if the rotor nut goes off on a helicopter, there's no redundancy.

The advantage of the rotorcraft, and probably one of the reasons that it's regarded as a safer way for regular people to fly,

is that there is a certain amount of redundancy built into these vehicles with multiple

rotors that can take you to the ground. The one I flew, it has eight rotors, and it can get you

safely to the ground on as few as four. What are the limitations then of a vehicle like an EV

tall? Honestly, the technology has virtually unlimited potential in its space.

This is one of the reasons why when I was talking to the pivotal people, I was saying, well, look, you know,

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