- Collisions, delays and traffic chaos reported due to failure of the robotic axis
- Police said system failure caused several vehicles to stop
- Baidu has a fleet of more than 500 driverless cars in Wuhan
A mass shutdown of robot taxis in the Chinese city of Wuhan has reportedly caused traffic chaos after several fully autonomous cabs suddenly stopped.
Some distressed riders claimed 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 Weibo on Wednesday, according to The Guardian.
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According to the preliminary findings, the police claim that a “system outage” had caused the problem, but there has been no official comment from Baidu on the incident so far.
A Baidu customer told Wired she was stuck in a robot axis with two friends for about 90 minutes on Tuesday.
According to the robotaxi driver, the cab stopped four out of five times during the trip before parking in front of an intersection with the screens telling all riders to stay aboard so a company representative could get online.
NEWS: Dozens of Baidu robot axes stopped on the road in Wuhan, causing crashes on highways and trapping passengers in the 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/fTitNMv8kj1 April 2026
It apparently took customers 30 minutes to reach a customer service representative. After even more waiting, the passengers decided to get out of the cab and find an alternative route.
Additional videos that have surfaced on social media, including X, appear to show dash cam footage of a driver crashing into the back of a stranded Baidu car, which had come to rest in the middle of a busy multi-lane highway.
On Chinese social media platform RedNote, one rider said: “I called robotaxis customer service but couldn’t get through at first. After calling repeatedly, everyone I called said they had sent a specialist. After 10.30pm, my order was canceled and I was stuck on the overpass with dump trucks all around me.”
Police said no injuries were reported and passengers exited their vehicles safely, according to the BBC.
Analysis: Not a good look for robot axis
Robotaxi skeptics have long warned about software and technical flaws 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-sharing apps Uber and Lyft announced deals with Baidu to test their Apollo Go cars on UK roads, with the aim of starting trials in 2026. But the latest incident could lead to significant backlash.
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’re going to make good choices about this technology, we need to understand entirely new types of risks,” he added.
After all, this is not the first time we have seen negative headlines surrounding autonomous driving technology.
According to Futurism, Tesla’s Robotaxi service has crashed more than equivalent cabs with a human driver, despite having a safety monitor behind the wheel.
In addition to this, Waymo experienced a similar problem 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 road signs and traffic lights.
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