Horse wrote:... for me, part of driving on a smart motorway is to be prepared, if the car starts to fail - the merest hint, I'll do the utmost to coax it into the next refuge area.
And if the failure is such that you can't make it? Do you really want to be forced to sit in a live lane with 40 tons of HGV sharing it, maybe with a driver that is staring at his phone, or maybe steering with his elbows? How much do you really trust the people and systems responsible for closing the lane and how much do you trust the other road users to observe and obey the closure?
Are you prepared to bet your life, or those of your passengers on it?
"Smart" motorways are inherently unsafe and should be reverted to hard shoulders.