‘System malfunction’ causes robotaxis to stall in the middle of the road in China

A “system malfunction” has caused several self-driving robotaxis to stall in the middle of the road in China, police have confirmed, after distressed riders were stranded for hours.Local authorities in the central Chinese city of Wuhan said they began receiving calls “one after another” on Tuesday night from riders reporting that autonomous vehicles operated by the Chinese internet company Baidu had frozen.“Multiple Apollo Go cars stopped in the middle of the road, unable to move,” police said in a statement on Wednesday, referring to Baidu’s driverless taxi service. “After investigation, preliminary findings suggest the cause was system malfunction.”Baidu has a fleet of more than 500 driverless cars in Wuhan. The statement did not specify how many cars were involved in the sysem malfunction.One rider, recounting their 90-minute ordeal on the Chinese social media platform RedNote, said their vehicle broke down on an elevated highway in Wuhan at 9pm local time.“I called robotaxi’s customer service, but couldn’t get through at first. After calling repeatedly, everyone I called said they had dispatched a specialist,” the user said. “After 10.30pm, my order was cancelled, and I was stuck on the overpass with dump trucks all around me.”The rider was eventually rescued, but accused Apollo Go customer service agents of providing “useless platitudes” instead of “solutions for handling such an emergency”.Riders also uploaded footage of the incident to social media platforms, including one user who posted a video with the caption “Apollo Go, are you paralysed?” of their unsuccessful attempts to reach the company from an in-car tablet.This isn’t the first incident involving Baidu’s robotaxis. Last December, authorities in the city of Zhuzhou suspended robotaxi operations after a Baidu-produced autonomous vehicle ran over two pedestrians, putting them in intensive care.Baidu, China’s equivalent to Google, opened Apollo Go to the public in Beijing in late 2020 and now operates in designated areas across several Chinese cities.It provided 3.4m driverless rides in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to company filings, with total rides increasing by more than 200% compared with the same period in 2024.More recently, it has announced deals with the rideshare apps Lyft and Uber to deploy its autonomous vehicles on their platforms as it looks to expand its presence outside China.Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported.Additional reporting by Yu-chen Li