This case makes me think of my brother's place in rural Tennessee. To get to his house, you drive through a small creek, year round. For a hundred years in their community, they've managed without a bridge. I'm not sure driverless cars are ready for edge cases like this. Also, no one tell Enterprise I drove their rental through a creek.
Heck, that was the way I took into the city for work for a few years, shaved a good 30 mins off the commute.
You'd have to hold off for a few weeks every season change while the ice hardened up/melted or get stuck in it (thankfully I tended to get there after someone else found out).
There are many fords in the U.K., and one particularly notorious one, Rufford Ford, ate about one car a day until it shut a few years ago, and one or two people would need emergency services to rescue them every month.
Frankly, you never know when you’re going to have a bad day - I managed to inflict several thousand euro of repairs on my pickup a few months back driving through water that didn’t even come up to the axles - because unbeknownst to me some shithead mouse had chewed through the top of the fuel hose, and water got into the diesel.
So, I expect driverless cars to struggle just as much as humans do.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-676414...