[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_.