Yes. You bring up a great point: With some infrastructure improvements we could have "virtual" trains. Vehicles would talk to each other on the highway and organize into closely-spaced convoys. Only the lead vehicle would need an active human driver; the rest could follow at extremely close distances--drafting off each other--and would not need a human driver (or their human drivers could go off-duty). The point of using asphalt rather than rails is that it makes it easy to switch between individual car mode and automated virtual train mode.
This idea is not new and it mostly applies to freight convoys but I think it also has merit for ad hoc passenger car convoys on long highway trips.
> With some infrastructure improvements we could have "virtual" trains. Vehicles would talk to each other on the highway
I think the idea is to get rid of the roads and have the robo vehicles travel instead on tracks. That increases fuel efficiency and bypasses a lot of AI challenges.
Not only that. Overhead electrical solves a lot of the mining/environmental impact of batteries.
It’s the low-key case that Elon will be remembered poorly (like Robert Moses’ rapidly degrading legacy) for
1) Having the wrong vision for EVs (but successfully executing non it anyway)
2) Making space travel cheap (thereby increasing the amount of carbon energy dedicated to it) without really improving an average human’s quality of life
The very marginal benefits of laying road vs track more or less disappear when automation in play.
Is is really worth maintaining the ability to go off road/track when you’re not even driving anymore?