[rootusrootus]

Earlier today I was driving on the highway with autopilot (I have a Model 3) and came to a section where the road is angled in such a way and the pavement is old enough that there is a fair amount of standing water. Driving manually, I steer to the right or left slightly to avoid the ruts filled with an inch or two of standing water. Autopilot, on the other hand, was perfectly happy to blast right through it.

That's the kind of weird edge case that makes me think we're farther from real self-driving than most people want to admit. I'd be hard pressed to define exactly how I'd tell the computer to avoid that. Maybe the answer is that it can't deal with that until it results in hydroplaning, and then it reacts however it can.

[catalogia]

That's a particularly insidious circumstance since standing water can conceal hazards from any vision system these cars or humans have. I would expect self-driving cars to refuse to drive through water in any circumstance. There could be a large pothole in the puddle that would ruin your car.

Worse than a mere car-destroying pothole, what if the flooded portion of the road no longer existed at all? That's a common enough occurrence that student drivers are generally warned about it specifically, warned to never drive across flooded sections of roadways because your car might fall into 10 feet of water without warning. If a self-driving car doesn't avoid a scenario we teach teenagers to be wary of, I don't think it deserves to be called self-driving.

[jpindar]

I guess no one on my dead end street will be getting a self driving car then. There's a low spot near the main road that causes a large puddle all the way across the street whenever it rains.

There's a few other places in town that often flood, including one on a main road that doesn't really have any alternative route. There's also a section of the road along the coast where high surf sometimes hits the sea wall and splashes up and over it on to the street. It's quite a sight, but I wonder what a self driving car would make of _that_.

[Johnny555]

You have local information that cars don't yet know (but they probably will someday -- cars can send detailed road conditions to a central database, or they can communicate with other cars, so the car in front of you can say "watch out, there's a big pothole 8 inches from the left lane line" and your car will try to avoid it.

What do human drivers do there when they are unfamiliar with the road? Seems like the auto pilot should be able to do at least no worse than human drivers.

[rootusrootus]

> What do human drivers do there when they are unfamiliar with the road?

I assume the same as me -- I avoid water-filled ruts whether I'm familiar with a particular road or not.

It may well get advanced enough some day to pick up the difference between wet pavement and water rut, and car-to-car communication could potentially help, but that's a level of technology improvement that feels considerably farther away than just a few years.

[Johnny555]

Car to car communication is already here:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/15/volvo-cars-in-europe-will-...