Unknown technical condition The problem caused multiple robots owned by Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze in mid-traffic on Tuesday, trapping some passengers in their vehicles for more than an hour.
In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of Apollo Go autonomous taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly crash and stop. Photos AND movies a program shared online in which Baidu cars stopped on busy highways, often in the swift lane.
A college student in Wuhan tells WIRED that she was stuck in a Baidu robotaxi with two friends for about 90 minutes on Tuesday. (She asked to be identified only by her last name, He, to protect her privacy.) The student claims that during the trip, the car broke down and stopped four or five times before finally parking at an intersection in eastern Wuhan. Fortunately, it was not a busy road and the group was not in immediate danger. According to a photo shared by WIRED, the car’s display asked passengers to stay in the car with their seatbelts fastened and wait for a company representative to arrive “in five minutes.”
He says it took about 30 minutes to reach a Baidu customer representative by phone. “They kept saying it would be reported to my supervisor, but they didn’t explain what caused it [the outage] or let us know how long we had to wait for the staff to arrive,” he says. However, no one came, and after another hour of waiting, the three passengers decided to simply get off and go home themselves (the doors were not closed).
On Chinese social media, other passengers also complained that they were unable to contact Baidu customer service. “I tried every way I could think of to call for support using the options provided in the app, but the phone line wouldn’t connect, and when I pressed the SOS button, I got a notification saying it was unavailable. So what exactly is SOS for?” one person wrote in a RedNote post along with a video showing the button not working. She said she had to force the door open and get out of the car because traffic had completely stopped behind her robotxi. “Apollo Go, you really owe me an apology,” she wrote.
Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Local police in Wuhan issued a statement around midnight in China saying the situation “was likely caused by a system failure,” but the incident was still under investigation. Police added that no one was injured and all passengers exited the vehicles. It’s unclear how much of Baidu’s robotaxis may have been affected.
One dashcam video published on RedNote shows a car passing 16 Apollo Go vehicles parked on the road over the course of 90 minutes. The recording shows several times how the driver narrowly avoids hitting the robotic axle by braking or changing lanes at the last moment.
Others apparently weren’t so lucky. In another post on RedNote, a man claimed to have collided with one of Baidu’s disabled vehicles. The man wrote in the caption that he was driving on the highway at more than 40 miles per hour when the car in front of him suddenly changed lanes to avoid a stopped robotaxi. He couldn’t react quickly enough and crashed into an autonomous car. Photos of the man’s orange SUV being towed show that the car’s front right fender was completely torn off and other parts appeared to be severely damaged.