Passengers stranded in moving traffic after robotaxi outage in China's Wuhan

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WUHAN: A massive system malfunction grounded more than 100 Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis in Wuhan on Tuesday night, March 31, leaving passengers stranded in the middle of high-speed traffic on the city’s elevated ring roads.

The outage, which began around 9 PM local time, caused the driverless vehicles to stop abruptly in active lanes. While some passengers managed to exit and walk to safety, many remained trapped inside as traffic continued to flow around them. 

Reports indicated that passengers were particularly fearful of exiting because their vehicles had stopped in the middle lanes of ring roads elevated highways designed for rapid transit without traffic lights where cars were passing at high speeds on both sides.

Inside the stalled taxis, on-screen instructions informed users: ‘Driving system malfunction. Staff are expected to arrive in 5 minutes.’ However, passengers reported that no personnel arrived within that timeframe, forcing many to press SOS buttons or wait for rescue by police and emergency responders.

While no injuries were reported, the incident resulted in significant traffic disruption and several minor rear-end collisions. This marks the first reported mass shutdown of robotaxis in China and occurs just as Baidu scales its fleet to over 1,000 vehicles.

The glitch is a significant setback for the company as it aggressively pushes into international markets. Baidu recently launched services in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and is currently working with partners to bring its autonomous technology to Britain and Switzerland. Authorities and Baidu are investigating the cause, with early findings pointing toward a fleet-wide software or connectivity failure.

Photo Credits: AFP