> I've travelled by road a fair bit around different countries and I assure you that a lot of high volume maintained roads still fall into the categories I outlined. Moreover, a lot of high volume roads aren't maintained. I honestly don't think you would even get remotely close to covering 80% of the roads for 20% of the cost.
I did not say 80% of the road, but 80% of the travel. Most of the kms driven are on highways, ring roads, and main roads into larger cities.
> having some roads updated and others not would actually be more dangerous than having none redeveloped because humans would demonstrate the same complacency across all the roads once they're used to autonomy on the new roads.
The car will pull over if you don't take over. I fail to see the issue in that. I'm advocating for a system that will autonomously drive where the infrastructure allows, not everywhere. If the system can handle driving at the highway for me for 2 hours, I'll be significantly more fit for driving the last 20 minutes.
> Shooting the cables is the easy if you have pavements with cables already installed. If you don't then you need to dig up the road to lay them
No you do not. They can even remove a small patch of tarmac, "shoot" and entire sewer line a long way and remove patch of tarmac at the destination. That's how they get optical fibers under roads and brick paving without digging it up.
> There's a whole load of costs involved in the planning stage; scheduling the work around busy periods (which sometimes means paying for night shift work) and organising the road closures
I never said it wasn't extra work. A cost benefit is needed, but the current AI approach will either cost many lives, or we agree on a better more expensive way.
> If you don't have total coverage then the mesh network isn't going to be reliable.
Again, a 100% solution is never happening. But by legislation we can increase adoption slowly, but steadily, until and past the point where we see the many benefits. In the EU all new cars must have DLR, AEB, TPM, ESP, ABS, seat belts, ect. - this would just be another thing new cars must have to ever be allowed to be sold on the market. It should not be up to the manufactures to agree, because they all want their solution, not an interoperable one.