I was working on project to provide telematics data to local councils from a well known UK car manufacturer.
We could detect pot holes, and poor traction areas of roads through ABS and other sensors on the car. From this we could generate a heatmap of bad areas with potholes.
The idea was good but I think the councils it was shown to weren't interested, it was a sort of shrug we won't fix them anyways. So why pay money for information we won't act upon.
Random tangent - here is a video of Arnold Schwarzenegger fixing a pothole (properly/improperly) in his neighbourhood