More than 100 Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis simultaneously stalled on roads across Wuhan after a system failure, trapping passengers inside vehicles and causing widespread traffic congestion, local police confirmed.
While no injuries were reported, some passengers were stuck for nearly two hours before calling police for assistance. Videos circulating on Chinese social media showed lines of driverless taxis frozen mid-road, drawing enormous public attention.
The incident has reignited safety concerns around autonomous vehicles. Previous incidents — including a robotaxi falling into a pit in Chongqing and a vehicle fire in Beijing — have already raised questions about the technology's reliability. Baidu has yet to issue a public statement about the cause of the outage.
Chinese tech companies including Baidu are aggressively expanding robotaxi services beyond domestic cities to the Middle East and other international markets. But incidents like this represent a significant trust challenge at a critical moment for the industry.
