Agreed and the narrator of the video says it will start with private driveways and parking lots and grow from there.
I would be happy with good roads before these, but whatever keeps me from destroying my tires. I will never buy a car with 19 inch wheels again.
Actually I could see it doing well in places like Disneyworld or Universal Studios.. places with lots of people walking on it, lots of concrete, lots of heat, and lots of wide-eyed easily-impressionable young people, witnessing first hand the benefits (IF it works as advertised). Family goes on vacation, is mightily impressed, then returns home to Podunk and starts telling everyone about it, and then one of these days some town will jump into it, make a name for themselves, put themselves on the map as the 'first solar roadways town', become all touristy, and popular, and then they have film festivals there and Robert Redford comes to visit.. and then EVERYONE wants in on it! whew, yeah, that ought to do it!
If any region of the country would benefit from this I'd say in colder climates would be best. Midwest/East coast.
The maintenance costs would be astronomical, even when tiles wouldn't be getting destroyed left and right every time some kid wanted to do a burnout or every time someone ran a flat down to the rim or when someone has an oil leak...you'd still have to replace the entire thing at some point when there were advances in solar tech. I love the idea, I just don't think it's viable.
Even better. If you actually have the interstate, highway and roads system paved with solar receiver... no reason not to piggy back on that and use it for massive communication infrastructure. Light-fi. And then, on top of that, build light-fi tire and boom.
These kind of new technology might make great sense for undeveloped area (hello India , China, and others) where it might be parity to just use these as transportation, communication and energy vs building up 3 new separate systems.
