Being Trapped Inside A Perfect Robotaxis Is A New Thing To Fear

If you asked me before what is scary about robotaxis The Apollo Go event I could list March 31 in Wuhan, China a few terrible things. But getting stuck in one never seemed scary. It happened to a Waymo passenger near me last year and this was the story kind of whimsical. But boy is robotaxi stuck on my fear list now. With a bullet.

with with some notable exceptionsrobotaxis currently on the road often act like Ned Flanders, which gives the companies that use them something to brag about. overall strong safety numbers. But we are slowly learning that robotaxis are an entirely new species in the ecosystem of our roads, and most importantly, their failure modes are unprecedented and alien.

According to WiredWuhan has hundreds of Baidu-owned robotaxis operated by Baidu’s Apollo Go app-based ride-hailing platform. Tuesday event, Baidu he will say latercaused by a mysterious “system failure”. The gist of it in various media reports is that for unknown reasons, about 100 robotaxis malfunctioned and wherever they were, came to a complete stop and turned into poorly placed traffic cones with people inside.

According to posts on social media, there were some collisions, but according to a police statement translated by Gizmodo with Google Translate, everyone “landed safely and there were no injuries.”

If you are upset because of mistakes at work
You can think of this team of self-governing carrots in Wuhan who went on strike and stopped in the middle of the road () pic.twitter.com/K0RFBadSkH

— 𝓩𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓮𝓩 𝓩𝓪𝓻𝓮 🌸🏳️ (@Jaciezyt) March 31, 2026

There are plenty of videos online to show this cars stopped in the middle of the main streetsbut whatever the nature of this failure, it is unlike anything else an overloaded human feedback survey system it caused Waymo cars to park in and near darkened intersections last year, where traffic was snarled, but at least the affected cars were moving slowly. On the contrary, online posts show that Baidu’s Apollo Go cars are parked in some really unpleasant places, including on busy highways.

Accounts from passengers who suffered through the ordeal are now all over the US media, but the juiciest and most harrowing stories have been culled from accounts submitted to Chinese TV news and then recorded by bloggers. CarNewsChina I have provided the most extensive versions of the stories of “Ms. Zhou” and “Mr. Lu” that I could find.

Wuhan, like Ms. Zhou and Mr. Lu, is surrounded by “Ring Roads,” mostly high-altitude highways that completely cut off any escape route if you get stuck there. Roundabouts are not exotic. We have it in the US Even so, Wuhan looks intimidating.

Both passengers report that they stopped at high roundabouts. According to CarNewsChina, Mr. Lu reported that “large trucks were speeding by from both sides.” The wind from all this growing traffic shook the cars from side to side. In Ms Zhou’s case, a warning popped up telling her not to open the door – which seems like a pretty good warning. Meanwhile, in Mr. Lu’s robot taxi (according to CarNewsChina:

“(T)he SOS button inside the car was “completely useless” and calls made through the back seat screen were automatically cut off. Finally, after reaching the official 400 customer service hotline, he was told that an expert would be sent. But after waiting for about an hour, no one came. In desperation, Mr. Lu called the police. 11:00 p.m., allowing him to safely exit the high highway.

Ms. Zhou’s story plays out the same way, but (again, according to CarNewsChina) has a shocking ending:

Despite the difficulty, Ms. Zhou still received the full fare.

If there’s one good thing to come out of this story, it’s this: Reports of the incident say it began just before 9 p.m. and ended about two hours later—the length of a feature film. This means that a High concept horror/thriller from Blumhouse it’s probably already greenlit. It cannot be expected.

Gizmodo has reached out to Baidu for comment and will update this article if we hear back.