- Collisions, delays and traffic chaos reported due to robotaxi outage
- Police said a system malfunction caused several vehicles to stop.
- Baidu has a fleet of more than 500 driverless cars in Wuhan
A massive breakdown of robot taxis in the Chinese city of Wuhan is believed to have caused traffic chaos, after several fully autonomous taxis suddenly came to a halt.
Some distressed passengers said they were left stranded for hours as several driverless rides ground to a halt.
“Several Apollo Go cars stopped in the middle of the road, unable to move,” police said in a statement posted on Chinese social media site Weibo on Wednesday. The Guardian.
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According to preliminary findings, police say a “system outage” is the cause of the problem, but so far there has been no official comment from Baidu on the incident.
A Baidu customer told Wired that she was stuck in a robo-taxi with two friends for about 90 minutes on Tuesday.
According to the robotaxi driver, the taxi stopped four or five times during the trip, before parking in front of an intersection with screens telling all passengers to stay on board for a company representative to sign in.
NEW: Dozens of Baidu robo-taxis stopped on the road in Wuhan, causing accidents on highways and trapping passengers in cars, some for more than an hour. One passenger told me it took her 30 minutes to connect with a customer representative. Here is a video of a crash. pic.twitter.com/fTitNMv8kjApril 1, 2026
Apparently, it took customers 30 minutes to reach a customer service representative. After even more waiting, the passengers decided to get out of the taxi and find another route.
Other videos appearing on social media, including
On Chinese social media platform RedNote, one passenger said: “I called robotaxi customer service, but couldn’t get through at first. After calling several times, everyone I called told me they had sent a specialist. After 10:30 p.m., my order was canceled and I was stuck on the overpass with dump trucks all around me.”
Police said no injuries were reported and the passengers exited their vehicles safely, according to the BBC.
Analysis: It’s not a great look for robotaxis
Robotaxi skeptics have long warned of software and technical problems of this nature, as well as the real threat of cyberattacks that could theoretically take control of entire fleets of driverless vehicles.
The BBC reports that ride-hailing apps Uber and Lyft have announced deals with Baidu to test its Apollo Go cars on UK roads, with the aim of starting trials in 2026. But the latest incident could lead to significant setbacks.
Jack Stilgoe, professor of science and technology policy at University College London, told the BBC that while driverless technology “may be safer on average” than human drivers, this incident showed it could “still go wrong in completely new ways.”
“If we want to make good choices about this technology, we need to understand entirely new types of risks,” he added.
After all, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen negative headlines regarding self-driving technology.
According to Futurism, Tesla’s Robotaxi service crashed more than equivalent taxis with a human driver, despite having a safety monitor behind the wheel.
On top of that, Waymo experienced a similar issue in San Francisco last year, where a massive power outage caused a number of Waymo cars to stop in the middle of busy streets and intersections because they didn’t know how to navigate safely without working street signs and traffic lights.
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