Getting Stuck Inside a Glitching Robotaxi Is a Whole New Thing to Be Scared of

If you had asked me what was scary about robotaxis before the Apollo GO incident in Wuhan, China on March 31, I could have listed a few terrifying things. But getting stuck in one never felt so scary. This happened to a Waymo passenger near me last year and the story was somewhat crazy. But boy is getting stuck in a robotaxi now on my fear list. With one bullet.

With a few notable exceptions, robotaxis currently run on the road like Ned Flanders most of the time, which allows those companies to claim strong safety numbers overall. But we are slowly learning that robotaxis are an entirely new species to the ecosystem of our roadways, and importantly, their failure modes are unprecedented and foreign.

According to Wired, there are hundreds of Baidu-owned robotaxis in Wuhan, operated by Baidu’s Apollo Go app-based ride-hailing platform. Tuesday’s incident, Baidu later said, was caused by a mysterious “system failure.” The gist of it in various media reports is that for unknown reasons, about 100 robotaxis malfunctioned and came to a complete halt wherever they were, turning into poorly placed traffic cones with humans inside.

There were some skirmishes, according to posts on social media, but according to a police statement, which Gizmodo translated with Google Translate, all were “safely unloaded, and no injuries were reported.”

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There are plenty of videos online showing cars stopping in the middle of major roads, but whatever the nature of this failure, it seems like it’s nothing like the overloaded human response request system that caused Waymo vehicles to stop in and around blacked-out intersections last year, causing inconvenience to traffic, but at least the affected cars were moving slowly. By contrast, online posts show that Baidu’s Apollo Go vehicles actually stopped in some unpleasant places – including busy highways.

Accounts of passengers suffering this ordeal are now all over the American media, but the juiciest and most tragic stories have been culled from accounts provided to Chinese TV news, and then recorded by bloggers. CarNewsChina provided the most comprehensive version of the “Ms. Zhou” and “Mr. Lu” stories that I could find.

Wuhan is surrounded by “ring roads,” expressways that are mostly elevated, and completely cut off from any kind of escape route if you get stuck there, like Ms. Zhou and Mr. Lu did. Ring roads are not foreign. We have them here in the US Still, Wuhan sounds scary.

Both the passengers reported stopping at the elevated ring road. According to CarNewsChina, Mr Lu reported that “large trucks were passing fast on both sides.” The wind of increasing traffic may have shaken the cars here and there. In Ms. Zhou’s case, a warning kept coming up telling her not to open her door — which sounds like a pretty good warning. Meanwhile in Mr. Lu’s robotaxi (according to CarNewsChina:

“[T]The SOS button in the car was ‘completely useless’ and calls made through the back seat screen were automatically disconnected. After finally reaching the official 400 customer service hotline, he was informed that a specialist would be dispatched. However, even after waiting for about an hour, no one arrived. Desperate, Mr Lu called the police, who, along with Apollo Go staff, eventually reached him around 11:00 pm, allowing him to safely exit the elevated highway.

Ms. Zhou’s story follows a similar path, but (again, according to CarNewsChina) ends with a shocking twist:

Despite the crisis, Ms. Zhou was still charged the full fare.

If anything good can come from this story, it’s this: Reports about the incident say it began just before 9:00 pm and ended about two hours later – the length of a feature film. This means that a high concept horror/thriller from Blumhouse has probably already been greenlit. Can’t wait for that.

Gizmodo has contacted Baidu for comment, and will update this article if we hear back.