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…
Baidu's robotaxi division was announcing its Dubai expansion on March 31. Across Wuhan, more than 100 of its vehicles had other plans.
Apollo Go, Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing service, suffered a mass paralysis event on roads across Wuhan that day, with at least 100 vehicles stalling simultaneously, according to Reuters. Local media reported that some passengers were trapped inside the vehicles for nearly two hours — stranded on a Monday, in the middle of a city that hosts Apollo Go's largest deployment in China, with more than 1,000 driverless vehicles in operation.
"Just yesterday, Apollo Go announced the launch of fully driverless commercial operations in Dubai," CNEV Post noted, with timing that wrote its own headline.
Wuhan is not a small test bed. As of February 2026, Apollo Go operated in 26 cities globally, with cumulative orders exceeding 20 million, and a Q4 2025 driverless order count of 3.4 million — surging more than 200 percent year-over-year, according to the company's own disclosures. That is not a startup experiment. That is a scaled operation, and on March 31, a significant portion of Wuhan's fleet simply stopped.
Police in Wuhan described the incident as a system failure, per Reuters, though no official cause has been publicly confirmed. Industry insiders cited by CNEV Post attributed the stall to a safety self-check mechanism, similar to an earlier incident involving Waymo vehicles in San Francisco — an explanation that offers more texture than "system failure" but has not been independently confirmed.
The company has not published a post-mortem. Questions about what triggered the outage, what failsafes should have prevented it, and how many riders were affected in total remain unanswered publicly.
The Dubai launch, announced the same day as the Wuhan stall, was framed as proof of that maturity. "Fully driverless commercial operations" is a sentence designed to project inevitability. The stuck vehicles in Wuhan suggest a different picture. Roughly 10 percent of the Wuhan fleet — the company's largest in China — frozen simultaneously is not a peripheral failure. That is a system-level event, and a system-level event at 1,000 vehicles has different implications than one at 10.
Baidu has not published a full incident report. Questions about what triggered the outage, what failsafes should have caught it, and the total number of affected riders remain unanswered. Apollo Go called it a system failure. That is a description, not an explanation. The person trapped inside for two hours is still waiting for one.
Have you witnessed a robotaxi outage or been stranded in an autonomous vehicle? Reach the reporter at tips@type0.ai