You're referring to the tragedy of the commons I believe. So the simple answer is that they might not, and so perhaps there's a role for government oversight/r

You're referring to the tragedy of the commons I believe. So the simple answer is that they might not, and so perhaps there's a role for government oversight/requirements similar to safety requirements. It's not a stretch to consider this a safety issue, if only for the other human-piloted vehicles. But I think it could be in a private company's interest too. Better road conditions would be better for wear and tear on their vehicles. Lower maintenance costs on the road should result in lower tax burden for the company (assuming company pairs fair share of their taxes which admittedly may not be true). Cost of software improvements like this scale well (ie cost is distributed over time and customers well). In fact the vendor of the vehicle could present it as a competitive advantage over other vendors that don't address it in any way. I wasn't thinking the solution would be based on sensing the build-up of lane wear/ridges, I presumed the solution would be something along the lines of varying their lane position to avoid the specific case of always travelling in exactly the same spot in the lane. With some randomness I don't think it would take inter-company cooperation. Just the idea that if the same vehicles were travelling the same route, that the wear on the road would be reduced by some amount. Obviously this is a lot of armchair architecture-ing from some random front-end UI developer, but I think it's not unreasonable to think along these lines once they reach the point of optimisations. Fun to think about anyway.