You wouldn't automatically need low latency. In a situation like the above one the car could pull over and wait for the control center to tell it whether the drive on through the water or not.

Not quite the same problem but the Starship delivery vehicles work a bit like that - remote link to a control center. http://uk.businessinsider.com/doordash-delivery-robots-stars...

That would require the car to have the ability to override its tendency to not drive thru physical obstacles. Remote control to say "go into that lane", "turn left" is one thing, but remote control to drive thru what it perceives as a physical object is different.

It would need to be very low latency if the cars can not take sufficient action fast enough to be safe. But if the cars get to a point where they are safe enough but where that safety comes at the expense of being overly cautious in some instances (refusing to drive through a sheet of water and deciding to stop) that may be acceptable. E.g. in the given example, the car only needs input to say pretty much "safe to proceed at low speed until past obstacle, then reassess".

Onlive allowed gaming over a Videostream with minimal delay. ffmpeg[1] works too.

[1] http://fomori.org/blog/?p=1213