As the conversation around driverless cars progresses from “if” to “when,” the debate over the timeline for the mainstreaming of this technology rages on. Some argue millions of driverless cars will be available by 2020. Others maintain driverless cars will be mainstreamed by 2025. Many companies have indicated they will have cars to market by 2018 or 2019, but few have gone as far as giving a hard deadline for the commercial debut of autonomous vehicles. Until Ford Motor this week announced that the company plans to mass produce driverless cars and have them in commercial operation for use in a ride-hailing service by 2021. The shift comes as Ford claims it is no longer simply a carmaker, but a “mobility company.”

Ford went even further, announcing that its driverless cars would have no steering wheel, no gas pedal and no brake pedal. This would both make Ford’s fleet the first fully autonomous vehicles announced, and potentially put its cars out of step with state regulations. The California Department of Motor Vehicle’s draft autonomous vehicles regulations require drivers to be able to take control of any vehicle deployed on California roads, meaning that the cars Ford has planned would not be legal under the current proposed regulations. At the federal level, we are still awaiting guidance and model policies promised by “the end of summer” from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

This announcement sets a timetable for one of the greatest shifts the advent of driverless cars is likely to produce. Analysts predict that car sales could fall by as much as 40 percent as people begin to rely on ride-sharing services provided by fleets of driverless cars, making it easier to get around without owning a car or even having a driver’s license. BMW and Mercedes-Benz have also announced they view “transportation as a service,” and have started ridesharing services of their own, while General Motors has teamed up with Lyft to provide driverless ridesharing. Meanwhile, Uber has announced plans to start testing semi-autonomous vehicles with customers in Pittsburgh.

That driverless cars are coming has quickly become an inevitability, which means it is time for local governments to begin thinking about the ways this technology will transform daily life — and the way cities regulate it.

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