If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic and thought, “I wish my car would just stop here forever,” then Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxi service in Wuhan, China, has the experience for you. A widespread system outage caused multiple fully autonomous cabs to grind to a complete halt this week, leaving passengers stranded in the middle of busy roads, on overpasses, and near intersections — basically everywhere you’d least want to be stuck in a metal box with no driver.
The chaos unfolded on Tuesday when several Apollo Go vehicles suddenly stopped mid-route, apparently forgetting the most important part of being a taxi: getting people where they need to go. Chinese police confirmed the incident through a statement posted on Weibo, noting that “multiple Apollo Go cars stopped in the middle of the road, unable to move.” A preliminary investigation pointed to a system outage as the culprit, though Baidu has remained notably quiet on the matter.
For some riders, this wasn’t just a minor inconvenience. One passenger told Wired that she and two friends spent roughly 90 minutes trapped inside a malfunctioning robotaxi. The car stopped four or five times throughout the trip before finally parking itself in front of an intersection, where screens politely instructed everyone to stay put and wait for a company representative.
Spoiler: that representative took about 30 minutes to even pick up the phone. Eventually, the passengers gave up, stepped out, and found their own way home like it was 2005.
When the Robot Driver Calls in Sick
NEW: Dozens of robotaxis by Baidu 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 even connect to a customer representative.
Here’s a video of a crash. pic.twitter.com/fTitNMv8kj
— Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅 (@ZeyiYang) April 1, 2026
One of the more alarming moments from the incident came via social media, where dash cam footage appeared to show another vehicle rear-ending one of the stalled Baidu cars that had come to rest in the middle of a multi-lane highway. That’s exactly the kind of scenario that tends to make people nervous about sharing the road with an unmanned vehicle that has no ability to think on its feet — or wheels.
Another stranded rider shared their story on RedNote, describing how they repeatedly called customer service without success, were eventually told a specialist was being dispatched, and then had their order canceled entirely while they sat alone on an overpass surrounded by dump trucks after 10:30 PM. Police confirmed that no injuries were reported and that passengers exited safely, which is genuinely good news. But “nobody got hurt” is a pretty low bar for a transportation service to clear.
What This Means for the Future of Robotaxis
This incident comes at a particularly sensitive time for the autonomous vehicle industry. Baidu’s Apollo Go had been making real progress, with ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft reportedly announcing agreements to test the service on UK roads with trials aimed at starting in 2026. That timeline might be looking a little shakier now.
Jack Stilgoe, a professor of science and technology policy at University College London, put it well when he told the BBC that while driverless technology may statistically be safer than human drivers on average, events like this show it can “still go wrong in completely new ways.” That’s an important distinction. Human drivers make mistakes all the time, sure, but a single software glitch doesn’t usually take down an entire fleet simultaneously.
And Baidu isn’t alone in facing these growing pains. Tesla’s robotaxi service has reportedly been involved in crashes at a higher rate than human-driven vehicles, and Waymo dealt with its own mass stoppage in San Francisco after a major power outage left its cars unable to navigate without functioning traffic signals.
The dream of fully autonomous transportation is still very much alive, but incidents like this are a reminder that the road to getting there has more than a few unexpected stops along the way.