Just after 9pm on a Tuesday evening in Wuhan, more than 100 driverless taxis stopped moving.
Some were mid-journey. Some had passengers locked inside.
The screens displayed a message saying staff would arrive in five minutes.
For dozens of people, the wait lasted over an hour.
The mass shutdown on 31 March hit Apollo Go vehicles running on Baidu’s autonomous driving platform and is the first reported incident of its kind in China.
Multiple crashes were caused by the stalled vehicles.
One passenger said it took half an hour just to get through to a company representative.
Locked in, no one answering
While some passengers managed to exit without problems, others could not.
Vehicles locked, screens frozen on the same malfunction message, phone lines jammed.
The robotaxis were scattered across the city, causing traffic disruption throughout Wuhan.
No injuries were reported. Baidu, the Chinese internet and AI company that operates more than 1,000 robotaxis nationally, has not commented publicly on the incident.
The cause remains under investigation.
A centralised system, a single point of failure
The shutdown exposed something the driverless vehicle industry has been quietly nervous about for years.
When an entire fleet runs on one centralised control system, one failure can ground every car simultaneously.
It also raised immediate questions about security.
If a system error can freeze a fleet across a city, so could a targeted cyberattack.
This is not the first time autonomous vehicles have been stranded by forces beyond their own sensors.
In December 2025, a fleet of Waymo’s self-driving cars stopped in San Francisco after a power outage.
But the Wuhan incident is larger in scale and, critically, involved passengers trapped inside vehicles with no quick way out.
Baidu’s expansion plans
The timing is awkward. Baidu has been pushing Apollo Go internationally, launching driverless taxi services in Dubai and Abu Dhabi earlier this year as reported by CreatorZine.
The company plans to expand into Europe. Its vehicles use four-seater cars equipped with 12 cameras, LiDAR, radar and ultrasonic sensors, operating at Level 4 autonomy.
None of that matters much if the central system goes down and passengers cannot open the doors.
Why it matters
Autonomous vehicle companies have spent years building public trust through safety statistics and controlled rollouts.
A single incident like Wuhan can undo months of that work overnight, and the footage of stranded passengers will travel far further than any press release about safety records.
For the broader autonomous vehicle industry, this is the scenario regulators have been warning about: a demonstration that centralised systems need redundancy and that passengers need a reliable way out when things fail.
Baidu’s European expansion will now face harder questions. Regulators watching from Brussels and London have a fresh case study in what happens when the system behind the wheel stops working, and more than 100 reasons to ask what the backup plan is.
