100 Robotaxis Freeze on Same Day as Dubai Launch
On the same morning Baidu announced driverless commercial operations in Dubai, passengers in Wuhan were trapped inside stalled Apollo Go vehicles for nearly two hours. The company calls it a system failure. No post-mortem has been published.
image from Gemini Imagen 4
Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxi service experienced a mass paralysis event on March 31, with over 100 vehicles stalling simultaneously in Wuhan — approximately 10% of its largest China fleet — trapping passengers for nearly two hours while the company was announcing fully driverless commercial operations in Dubai. Police attributed the incident to a 'system failure,' though industry insiders cited a safety self-check mechanism, similar to prior Waymo incidents, without independent confirmation. Baidu has not published a post-mortem, leaving critical questions about root cause and failsafe design unanswered despite operating 1,000+ driverless vehicles across 26 cities with 3.4 million Q4 2025 orders.
- •A 10% simultaneous fleet freeze in Wuhan represents a system-level failure, not a peripheral incident — implications differ materially at 1,000 vehicles versus a small pilot.
- •Passengers trapped for nearly two hours highlights operational safety gaps in passenger egress procedures during autonomy system failures.
- •Baidu has not published a post-mortem or root cause analysis, creating a transparency deficit for regulators and public trust in autonomous ride-hailing at scale.
