The class-action lawsuit Uber is facing in California, which claims the company misclassified its drivers as independent contractors, threatens the core of its business model. If Uber were to hire its drivers as employees, it would be responsible for paying into Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and workers compensation insurance on their behalf, and it would lose some of its flexibility to expand and contract its workforce to meet demand. A recent napkin estimate from Fortune guessed that it would cost the company an additional $4.1 billion per year to switch all of its drivers from contractors to employees. (Though the current case applies only to California, it could be instructive in other states.)

In addition to Uber, the decision could impact the viability of companies like Postmates, Lyft, and other gig-economy companies that supply services by doling out jobs, gig by gig, to an army of freelancers. As an Uber lawyer recently put it in a court filing, this is “the leading case raising urgent questions about the classification of sharing-economy workers.”

Self-driving cars wouldn’t reduce damages if Uber were to lose the case. But the threat to Uber’s model would be much less threatening if it were no longer relying on labor. That could happen more quickly than you’d think. Last week, Toyota joined Nissan, General Motors, and Google in estimating that it will have self-driving cars on the road by 2020. Elon Musk, whose company Tesla is also working on self-driving cars, predicted last week that we’d be handing over the wheel to a computer within the next two or three years.

Meanwhile, the class-action lawsuit against Uber, filed in 2013, has two years later just been granted class certification on the plaintiffs’ claim that Uber failed to pass on tips to drivers. It denied class certification on the plaintiffs’ other claim, but gave them the opportunity to file a supplemental brief on that claim, and even the class certification it did grant could still change–more on that later.

The relative speed of self-driving car technology–which at Google, has already been tested for 1 million miles–and the notorious slowness of court proceedings made me wonder: Can Uber just wait this out? Is there any chance that by the time a conclusion is actually reached, Uber will already have self-driving cars on the road?

At first, this idea was a joke. Then I started to talk with labor lawyers.

How long for a decision in the Uber misclassification case? “I think you’re looking at years,” says Gail Gottehrer, a labor and employment litigator at Axinn Veltrop & Harkrider, whose practice focuses on class action defense, privacy and technology litigation, and digital workplace-related actions.