But now that you know that pothole is there you avoid it your next time passing. I assume an autonomous car would have a similar memory about road conditions. I also imagine the cars could share that information among themselves so instead of each driver having to learn about the pothole only one car would have to and then the network would be aware of it.
These cars will almost certainly be sharing what they've learned about the road with each other. The hard part of this is the mobile data network required to share high resolution LIDAR or other sensor data with many cars. The fact that roads are constantly changing makes it even harder.
Puts the balloon/UAV based internet projects a little bit more into perspective.
why not (mostly) a mesh network made up of the individual cars themselves, with a few connecting to the actual internet and acting in a sense like mobile cell towers? the cars would probably vote on which one in a vicinity was going to be come the next "hub" based on some algorithm accounting for ___location of surrounding cards, ___location of its own access point, as well as info about its likely route & destination.
Why not let the cars can talk to eachother, and through eachother to the outside world?
