Knight Rider 2010 depicts a starkly bleak version of the American Southwest in the year 2010, reimagining the original series as a desert-dwelling dystopia rather than a high-tech crime-fighting procedural. The world is characterized by a "crapsack" environment where centralized law enforcement has collapsed, leaving U.S. Marshals to compete with rogue smugglers and heavily armed outlaws in a lawless California wasteland. High-tech hubs known as The Dome serve as gated sanctuaries for the elite, while the rest of the population survives in a Mad Max-inspired social collapse.

Societal dynamics are dominated by the Chrysalis Corporation, which functions as a de facto sovereign entity, prioritizing technological acquisition and corporate espionage over human welfare. The film moves away from the glossy, urban aesthetic of the 1980s, suggesting that Earth's environmental and social decay would outpace the sleek consumerism originally envisioned by the franchise. In this timeline, Earth is a place of scavenged resources where high-tech vehicles are improvised from scrap metal rather than manufactured in pristine labs.

The film’s central technological prediction is brain uploading, where the character Hannah survives a physical assassination by downloading her consciousness into a Prism crystalline solid-state unit. While real-world 2010 saw the rise of cloud computing and early-stage AI assistants, it lacked the total neural transference depicted here. Retrospective analysis notes that the film predicted "pimped-out muscle cars with weapons and AI," whereas the actual year 2010 was defined by the mass adoption of pimped-out hybrids and smartphones. The film's vision of cyberspace as a lethal, immersive battleground also remains an unfulfilled divergence from our current digital landscape.