Not the same. It could complement but not replace a general purpose system.
Scania has a self driving truck convoy where a manned truck is followed by several driver less trucks using such beacons. It is not a trivial solution once you dig into it- normal wifi is too slow at highway speeds, and once the air is congested and re-transmissions occur it is even slower. Scania is using 802.11p [1] and still has backups for when connection is lost or delayed.
You'd need, what, 50 years of enforcement before you'd have enough cars on the road to trust it, and then of course what happens if its broken? What about pedestrians?
Well, yes ofcourse, object detection will still be a feature no doubt. The vehicle must have context of where it is. But overhauling infrastructure to be machine readable is an excellent idea to implement on high risk situations like suburbia and cities where pedestrians and dogs are actual factors. The vast majority of roads and infrastructure have no pedestrians. It's just highway and freeway. It would make sense for the car to follow other cars and calibrate its position accordingly without neccesarily "seeing".
True, that does give direction but not context. LAT/LONG gives no opinion on traffic speed and how to overtake when to switch lanes. My idea is that the pings are the other cars saying "I'm here, I'm here..." and the car can compute it's position relative to the other cars without having to see them. This is obviously not the main system, and more of an auxillary measure so the car can function in any condition.
