Robotaxi Outage in China Leaves Passengers Stranded on Highways
An unknown technique The problem caused a number of robo-taxis owned by Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze in the middle of traffic on Tuesday, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.
In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, netizens on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunctioning and stopping working. Photos and videos shared online show Baidu cars stopped on busy highways, often in the fast lane.
A Wuhan student 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 the car malfunctioned and stopped four or five times during the trip before finally parking in front of an intersection in eastern Wuhan. Fortunately, the road was not busy and the group was not in immediate danger. The screen displayed in the car instructed passengers to stay in the car with their seat belts on and wait for a company representative to come “in five minutes,” according to a photo he shared with WIRED.
He says it took about 30 minutes to get a Baidu customer representative on the phone. “They kept saying it would be reported to their superior. But they didn’t explain why [the outage] or tell us how long we had to wait for the staff to arrive,” he said. But no one ever came and after another hour of waiting, the three passengers decided to get out and go home alone (the doors were unlocked).
On Chinese social media, other passengers also complained about not being able to reach Baidu customer service. “I tried every way I could to call for help using the options displayed by the app, but the phone line wasn’t going through and when I pressed the SOS button it told me it wasn’t available. So what exactly is SOS for?” one person wrote in a post on RedNote alongside a video showing the button not working. She said she had to force the door open and get out of the car as traffic came to a complete stop behind her robotaxi. “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 “probably caused by a system malfunction”, but the incident remains under investigation. No one was injured and all passengers got out of the vehicles, police added. It is unclear how many of Baidu’s robotaxis may have been affected.
A dash cam recording posted on RedNote shows a car overtaking 16 Apollo Go vehicles parked on the road in the space of 90 minutes. On several occasions, the video shows the driver narrowly avoiding hitting the robot-axis by braking or changing lanes at the last minute.
Others apparently weren’t so lucky. In another RedNote article, a man claimed to have crashed into one of the faulty Baidu vehicles. The man wrote in the caption that he was driving over 40 mph on a highway when the car in front of him suddenly changed lanes to avoid the stopped robo-taxi. He couldn’t react fast enough and ended up crashing into the self-driving car. Photos of the man’s orange SUV being towed show the car’s right front fender was completely torn off and other parts appear to have sustained significant damage.
