Platooning kind of messes up highway traffic because people need to either cross a ton of lanes to get in and out of the platoon (if the platoon is on the left), or non-platoons can't get on/off (if the platoon is on the right). If everything was forced to platoon on highways it would work. But that's like 30-50 yrs later, after the tech is introduced, barring some really radical legislation with huge popular and state support.
Not sure if it would be techically possible to have gaps in the platoon after every five cars, but at least it would be trivial to set max size of one platoon to something reasonable.
Sure, yea, I don't mean like it becomes literally impossible to merge in. Just that for any reasonable size platoon, it disrupts more traffic than it saves. Given existing roads and the existence of not-platooned cars on the same roads, it doesn't really work.
