A few weeks ago, I was having coffee with a friend who is a highly regarded insurance defense attorney in Center City Philadelphia. We were discussing several topics, when the topic of Tesla’s Model 3 and its autonomous capabilities came up. In true lawyer fashion, instead of focusing on the features and the functionality, the question of—what happens to all of the trial lawyers (plaintiffs and defense) when autonomous cars become the norm?—became the served-up topic du jour.

As most car industry analysts agree, the dawn of the autonomous car is here. Tesla expects all of its cars manufactured in 2017 and beyond to be equipped with autonomous driving hardware (when the software will be available is still up in the air). Volkswagen expects its first self-driver by 2019. Ford has announced that they will produce an autonomous vehicle by 2020. BMW’s iNext car will debut in 2021. Toyota will hit the market with its version of Knight Rider in 2020. Delphi and MobilEye, companies vying to produce “aftermarket” self-driving kits that would allow you to convert a conventional vehicle into an autonomous driving vehicle, predict that their kits would be available by 2019, which would potentially hasten the takeover of our roads by supercomputers on wheels. In fact, Uber has made it a goal to go completely driverless by 2030. By 2040, less than 24 years from now, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) predicts that 75 percent of the world’s vehicles will be autonomous.

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