Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis freeze mid-road in Wuhan
Several Baidu Apollo Go autonomous vehicles stalled in live traffic in Wuhan, central China, on Tuesday night after a system malfunction caused the cars to stop responding. Local authorities confirmed they received calls from riders in rapid succession reporting that the vehicles had frozen in the road.
Passengers were stranded for up to two hours, according to TechCrunch. CNBC reported that the incident led to at least one highway collision, citing social media accounts of the stoppage.
Riders who contacted Baidu's customer service during the outage said agents offered what they described as useless platitudes, according to The Guardian, with no practical resolution provided during the period vehicles remained immobile.
Baidu has not publicly disclosed the technical cause of the malfunction. The company's Apollo Go service operates one of the largest commercial robotaxi fleets in China and has been central to Baidu's strategy to monetise its autonomous driving investment. The Wuhan incident is the most operationally disruptive reported failure of the service to date and is likely to attract scrutiny from Chinese transport regulators.
