This is the nitty gritty of automotive law, not just the rules of who gets on the road but the web of regulations and statutes that decide what happens once you're there. For automated drivers, most of these rules have yet to be written, and they'll need to be handled extremely delicately. If the liability laws are too punitive towards driver bots, letting Paul and Julie join in a suit against the self-driving-tech developer, then companies might avoid the sector entirely. On the other hand, if the laws leave car-owners on the hook for anything the new gadgets do, consumers may be scared away from buying them. There's a balance to be struck, but it will have to be made across multiple courts and stand up to countless civil challenges.

The financial stakes are high. According to the Insurance Research Council, auto liability claims paid out roughly $215 for each insured car, between bodily injury and property damage claims. With 250 million cars on the road, that's $54 billion a year in liability. If even a tiny portion of those lawsuits are directed towards technologists, the business would become unprofitable fast.

Florida, Nevada and California have all passed laws to make the cars street legal, thanks in large part to big lobbying efforts by Google, but according to Professor Smith, those bills only scratch the surface. "They don't really resolve the human driver's obligations behind the wheel," Smith told The Verge. "They don't really provide standards of performance for these vehicles." That's fine if all you want is to test out a fleet of prototypes on public highways, but changing the way we drive is going to require a lot more compromise. That could mean a radically scaled-down vision of the project, or a legal struggle that keeps the Google Car in prototype limbo for the rest of the decade. Either way, they've got a long road ahead of them.