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Baidu's robotaxi service in Wuhan went dark on Tuesday, and for some passengers the five-minute wait turned into much longer.
The company, which operates one of the largest commercial robotaxi fleets in the world under the Apollo Go brand, experienced what local police described as a system malfunction that left multiple vehicles stopped on roads and highways across the central Chinese city. Passengers reported being trapped inside for extended periods. One college student told Wired she and two friends were stuck for about 90 minutes before the car eventually parked near an intersection in eastern Wuhan. A customer support call took 30 minutes to connect. The SOS button in the app told one passenger it was unavailable. She forced the door open and got out on a highway as traffic bore down on the stopped robotaxi ahead of her.
"I tried every way I could think of to call for help using the options the app showed, but the phone line would not go through, and when I pressed the SOS button it told me it was unavailable," she wrote on RedNote, a Chinese social platform. "So then what exactly is the SOS for? Apollo Go, you really owe me an apology."
Baidu has not said how many vehicles were affected or what caused the outage. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Local police said no one was injured and all passengers have exited the vehicles. One person reported crashing into a stopped Apollo Go vehicle on a highway after the car in front of it swerved to avoid the robotaxi. Photos show significant damage to the person's vehicle. At least two collisions were reported on the same day, according to photos and videos posted on Chinese social media.
The college student who spent 90 minutes trapped in the vehicle said the car screen asked passengers to remain inside with seatbelt on and wait for a company representative to arrive in five minutes. "They kept saying it would be reported to their superior," she told Wired. "But they didn't explain what caused the outage or let us know how long we needed to wait for the staff to come. No one came." After another hour of waiting, the three passengers decided to get out and go home on their own.
The Wuhan outage exposes the gap between how robotaxi companies describe their services and what passengers experience when the system fails at scale. Baidu has been operating Apollo Go as a commercial service in cities across China for several years, claiming the fleet represents some of the most advanced autonomous driving capability in the world. Cumulative fully driverless rides exceeded 20 million by February 2026, with operations in 26 cities and weekly peak rides above 300,000. But a fleet-wide software failure does not just strand passengers. It turns the company's own vehicles into obstacles on roads that other drivers have to navigate around at speed.
The incident follows a pattern of on-the-ground failures that do not always make it into the industry's public statements about safety and readiness. A RedNote video posted by a Wuhan resident shows 16 Apollo Go vehicles parked consecutively on the same road over a span of 90 minutes, with other drivers forced to brake or change lanes at the last moment to avoid them.
That question of what happens when things go wrong is not unique to Baidu. Senator Ed Markey sent letters to seven AV companies asking how often their vehicles need remote help. All refused to say. Waymo was the only company that admitted to using overseas remote assistance workers. Waymo has roughly 70 remote assistance agents on duty at any given time overseeing a fleet of about 3,000 robotaxis, a ratio of roughly one agent for every 43 vehicles. Tesla's remote operators can directly control vehicles only at 2 mph or less, and cannot drive faster than 10 mph. In California, SEIU California and the California Gig Workers Union are supporting legislation that would require AV companies to send a real person when things go wrong. "There has been far too many times when city workers like me have had no way to move a stuck robotaxi that is blocking traffic," the union said.
Apollo Go launched commercial robotaxi service in Wuhan in August 2022, one of the first cities to receive national unmanned demo operation qualification. The company planned to fully cover Wuhan by 2024 with 1,000 sixth-generation RT6 vehicles.
Whether that five-minute response time Baidu promises on its in-car screens represents a staffing gap, a system design failure, or an outage too large to respond to quickly is not yet clear. What is clear is that a city full of driverless cars with no functioning emergency channel and no way to reach a human is a problem that shows up only when the system fails.
The question is what happens when the system fails not at one intersection but across an entire city at once.
Baidu has said little publicly beyond acknowledging the malfunction is under investigation.
