In the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported that the cars suddenly malfunctioned and stopped operating. Photos and videos shared online show Baidu cars on busy highways, often stopped in the fast lane.
A college student in Wuhan told WIRED that she and two friends were stuck in a Baidu robotaxi for about 90 minutes on Tuesday. (She asked to be identified only by her last name, He, to protect her privacy.) The student says the car malfunctioned during the trip and stopped four or five times, eventually stalling in front of 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 with WIRED, a screen display in the car told passengers to remain in the car with their seat belts on and to wait for a company representative to arrive “in five minutes.”
They say it took about 30 minutes to get through to a Baidu customer representative on the phone. “They kept saying that it would be reported to their superior. But they did not say what the reason was [the outage] Or tell us how long we had to wait for the staff to arrive,” he says. But no one ever came, and after waiting for another hour, the three passengers decided to get out and go home alone (the doors were not locked).
On Chinese social media, other passengers also complained about being unable to reach Baidu’s customer support. “I tried everything I could to call for help using the options shown by the app, but the phone line didn’t come through, and when I pressed the SOS button it told me it was unavailable. So what exactly is SOS for?” one person wrote in a post on RedNote along with a video of the button not working. She said she was forced to open the door and get out of the car as traffic behind her robotaxi came to a complete stop. “Apollo Go, you really need to apologize to me,” he wrote.
Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Local police in Wuhan, China, released a statement around midnight saying the situation was “possibly caused by a system malfunction”, but the incident was still under investigation. Police said no one was injured and all passengers exited the vehicles. It’s unclear how many of Baidu’s robotaxis may have been affected.
A dashcam recording posted on RedNote shows a car driving past 16 Apollo Go vehicles parked on the road in a span of 90 minutes. On several occasions, the video shows the driver narrowly avoids colliding with the robotaxis by applying brakes or changing lanes at the last minute.
Apparently others were not so lucky. In another RedNote post, a man claimed that he was hit by one of the malfunctioning Baidu vehicles. The man wrote in the caption that he was driving at a speed of more than 40 miles per hour on the highway, when the car in front of him suddenly changed lanes to avoid the stopped robotaxi. He could not react fast enough and was hit by the self-driving car. Photos of the man’s orange SUV being towed away show that the car’s front right fender is completely torn off, and other parts also suffer major damage.
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