To get to the Uber conference on flying cars in Los Angeles last week, where I was scheduled to interview Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, I hailed a Lyft. My driver was understandably amused about where I was going.

"Flying cars?" he said, laughing. "That makes more sense than the self-driving ones."

My driver was right: these days, it seems likely Uber will have flying cars before it has self-driving cars. The fatal crash involving one of the ride-hailing company's autonomous test vehicles in Tempe, Arizona this past March was a huge blow to the company's self-driving program. Federal investigators are still digging into what happened, but the death of Elaine Herzberg forced Uber to shut down its testing program nationwide.