What also might go unsaid here is: the practical effect of Level 3's requirements vs. its capabilities is that it probably will not be able to engage often. If the car can't safely do it, it's not going to do it. So you'll invest all this money in a Level 3 car, only to find out that it only engages maybe once or twice a year, when the planets line up and it has all the info and environment it actually needs to work.
To be fair, one would also think that releasing a self-driving system that drives into the back of a semi at speed would be a PR/Marketing nightmare, but it hasn’t slowed Tesla down.
Already, Toyota has released their third version of driving assistance, TSS2.5, which has reasonably decent ability to stay in lanes on highways. For anyone who does any highway driving, it's a competent system that a driver can use a good portion of highway driving. And it's likely less capable than Honda's system.
OpenPilot is another example - pretty good at most roads on highways or large boulevards. Like others, not for use in city streets.
At least for the American road system, you may be underestimating how much time people spend on large, well-defined highways that could use this system. Some other countries rely less on big highways and this could affect the portion of time available to use it.
