Baidu's Wuhan outage, Hello's Zhuzhou injury accident and a reported pause on new permits suggest China's autonomous taxi drive is shifting focus to safety

image credit: Bamboo Works

Key Takeaways:

  • China's robotaxi story is transitioning from one of ride volume, city coverage and vehicle cost to one of safety after two recent incidents
  • Baidu still offers the biggest scale in China, but Pony AI, WeRide, XPeng, Caocao and U.S. rivals like Waymo and Tesla are turning robotaxis into a crowded global contest

China's robotaxi sector was supposed to be entering an era of scale, as operators put more of their vehicles on the road after years of testing. Instead, it's now getting a safety audit – which some may argue was overdue.

A February report from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology described 2025 as a turning point for autonomous driving as robotaxis and autonomous delivery vehicles moved from pilots toward commercialization. It framed autonomous driving as a strategic part of global technology competition, and not simply another transport business.

But now China has reportedly tapped the brakes on its own robotaxi program – an important piece of the autonomous driving story – after a couple of recent incidents, including one that left the streets of a major city clogged with stalled driverless cars. The pause is likely to set back China's robotaxi program, perhaps by up to a year or more. But the move is also likely to help over the longer term by building public trust in a system that still feels strange and slightly uncomfortable to many ordinary riders.

From vehicle safety to system safety

On March 31, multiple robotaxis from Baidu's (BIDU.US; 9888.HK) fleet of Apollo Go robotaxis suddenly stopped on the roads in Wuhan, capital of Central China's Hubei province. Local police assigned preliminarily blame to a system failure, with no injuries reported. Reuters reported that at least 100 vehicles were affected, while local media said some passengers were trapped inside stalled vehicles for nearly two hours.

The incident stood out from single-vehicle cases of the past because it appeared to reflect a fleet-level failure. One robotaxi malfunction is a product problem. A hundred robotaxis stopped in traffic begins to resemble an infrastructure problem.

China paused new autonomous-vehicle licenses following the outage, according to several foreign media reports, a move that would slow new pilots and fleet expansions. On April 14, three ministries also called for nationwide self-inspections and stronger emergency-response supervision for intelligent connected vehicle road tests. In Dongguan, Apollo Go was reportedly conducting safety drills and vehicle inspections and would gradually resume after the work was completed.

Wuhan was the biggest bump in the road for the industry to date, but it wasn't the first warning sign. Last December, a Hello autonomous vehicle in the city of Zhuzhou, in Central China's Hunan province, was involved in an accident that reportedly sent two people to a hospital and resulted in the temporary suspension of local service.

Public trust is critical for any new technology to gain traction. But it's especially important for robotaxis, which have the ability to injure people and cause major traffic problems. Riders caught up in the Wuhan outage complained not only about becoming trapped in stalled cars, but also poor SOS support. In Dongguan users lamented Apollo Go's disappearance. Passengers may tolerate slow, awkward rides if they are cheap and convenient, but they react strongly when they get stranded or their safety is jeopardized.

The scale of the Baidu outage owes in no small part to its leadership in China's robotaxi race. The company does not break out Apollo Go revenue or profit in its financial reports, but provides information about the scale of the service. It said Apollo Go delivered 3.4 million fully driverless operational rides in last year's fourth quarter, with weekly rides peaking at more than 300,000 and service available in 26 cities.

Crowded field

While Baidu was one of China's earliest companies to embrace robotaxis, it has since been joined by others in an increasingly crowded field. Pony AI (NASDAQ:PONY) (2026.HK) and WeRide (NASDAQ:WRD) (0800.HK) have entered the race in both China and other global markets, showing rapid robotaxi revenue growth but also the heavy cost of fleet expansion. Pony AI's fleet currently exceeds 1,400 vehicles, while WeRide has reported triple-digit robotaxi revenue growth. Both companies' robotaxi businesses are still losing money at the operating level.

Apart from those leaders, XPeng (NYSE:XPEV) (9868.HK) says its VLA 2.0-equipped robotaxi has started public road testing, with trial operations planned for later this year. Caocao (2643.HK), the ride-hailing arm of Geely, has said it plans to deploy thousands of purpose-built robotaxis globally in 2027 and is targeting 100,000 vehicles by 2030.

Outside China, names like Alphabet-backed Waymo and Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) are leading the race, while others like Uber (UBER.US) are placing their bets through investments and partnerships with direct operators like Pony AI and WeRide.

Analysts project China's robotaxi fleet could nearly triple this year, though those predictions were probably made before the Baidu outage and latest safety pause. Meantime, some forecasts see global autonomous taxi services becoming a multibillion-dollar market by 2035 as more vehicles exit the testing lane and move into the taxi mainstream.

Geopolitics enters the picture

Geopolitics are also becoming an increasing part of the global robotaxi story. China has sold millions of new passenger cars with Level 2 (L2) driver-assistance functions and opened tens of thousands of kilometers of test roads across vehicle-road-cloud pilot cities. In March, XPeng Chairman He Xiaopeng argued China should move faster from L2 to Level 4 (L4) vehicles – the lowest level considered fully autonomous in a six-tiered system from L0 to L5.

Notably, no foreign companies have entered China's robotaxi markets despite its big potential. While none appears to have commented about that decision, many may worry about heavy regulation and overheated competition like the type that led Uber to abandon the market after spending billions of dollars there in the early 2010s.

In the U.S., autonomous driving is increasingly viewed through a national-security lens, with new rules restricting some China- and Russia-linked vehicle-connectivity systems and automated-driving software.

China has a real edge with its lower EV costs, dense city pilots and local-government support But as the Baidu incident shows, safety problems are also an important factor that can't be overlooked as companies scale up. Investors have started pricing in that risk. After reports emerged on the permit pause, Baidu's Hong Kong-listed shares fell 2.8%, while Pony AI and WeRide dropped 5.5% and 4.7%, respectively.

While the outage marks a setback, China's robotaxi race certainly isn't ending. Instead, it is entering a new qualification round. In the end, the winners may not be the companies with the most cities, cheapest vehicles or highest ride count. They will be the ones who can show that driverless fleets can behave like public infrastructure: useful when everything works, and still safe and quickly recoverable when something breaks down.

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Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.