China suspends all new robotaxi licenses after Baidu outage

China has halted the issuance of new autonomous vehicle licenses following an incident last month in which more than 100 Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis abruptly stopped on the streets of Wuhan, stranding passengers and snarling traffic, Bloomberg reported on April 29, citing people familiar with the matter.

The freeze prevents self-driving companies from adding vehicles to existing fleets, launching new pilot programs, or expanding into additional cities. No end date has been set.

A Night of Chaos in Wuhan
On the evening of March 31, Apollo Go robotaxis across Wuhan — where Baidu operates its largest fully driverless fleet of more than 1,000 vehicles — lost contact with the company's cloud dispatch system and stopped mid-route. Videos circulating on Chinese social media showed a passenger trapped inside a vehicle halted in the fast lane of an expressway as trucks sped past, while other images depicted a robotaxi struck from behind after stopping in the middle of a highway.

Many passengers were unable or too frightened to exit their vehicles because of surrounding traffic and had to call police for assistance. Local law enforcement confirmed a "system failure" had caused the outage but did not specify how many vehicles were affected; Chinese media reports put the figure at more than 100. Baidu has not publicly commented on the root cause
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