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A massive system failure on Tuesday left over a hundred robotaxis stranded in the streets of Wuhan, China, Wired reports, with dozens of the cars stopping dead in the middle of traffic and even highways.
The robotaxis are operated by Baidu, a Chinese tech conglomerate which has deployed hundreds of the self-driving cars in the central China city.
Footage uploaded to social media paints a partial picture of the chaos. One dashcam video — it appears to be this one — shows a driver passing at least 16 of Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis that stopped in the road in the span of 90 minutes, according to the magazine’s reporting, congesting traffic. Others showed them halted in highways, sometimes in the fast lane.
The outage appears to have resulted in at least three crashes. On the Chinese social media site RedNote, a user who uploaded dashcam footage says he rear-ended a stranded Baidu robotaxi after the car in front of him suddenly changed lanes to avoid hitting it, leaving him little time to react, per Wired. The magazine also found videos of two other collisions, with one RedNote user confirming she drove past a van that slammed into the rear of a Baidu cab.
For passengers, the experience was no less chaotic. One told Wired she was stuck in a Baidu robotaxi with two friends for 90 minutes on the night of the outage, and described their frustrating attempts to reach customer support.
The car, according to the passenger, stopped four to five times before finally parking in front of an intersection that, fortunately, wasn’t busy. A screen in the car told them to stay put because a company rep would come by in “five minutes,” but when no one came, they spent another half hour trying to reach customer support. When support told them nothing helpful, she and her friends decided to exit the vehicle, which was not locked, and go home.
Other passengers fumed about similar experiences on RedNote, with one complaining that pressing the robotaxi app’s “SOS button” returned a message saying it was unavailable. “So then what exactly is the SOS for?” they wrote, quoted by Wired.
Baidu has not responded to media requests for comment. Authorities in Wuhan issued a statement that night saying that the incident was “likely caused by a system malfunction” that is still being investigated.
Fortunately, despite the spate of collisions, no injuries have been reported.
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