Chinese regulators have imposed a nationwide freeze on new autonomous vehicle licences following last month's mass system failure that paralysed more than 100 of Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxis in Wuhan, trapping passengers in stationary vehicles on busy roads and elevated expressways for up to two hours.
Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that authorities have told local governments to review the sector and have halted all new approvals, blocking companies from adding driverless cars to existing fleets, expanding into new cities or launching fresh test programmes.
Baidu's Wuhan operations remain suspended while local authorities investigate the incident.
The failure occurred on the evening of 31 March, when Apollo Go vehicles operating across multiple districts of Wuhan simultaneously stopped responding to commands and froze in live traffic at approximately 8.57pm local time.
Wuhan police said a preliminary assessment indicated a "system malfunction" had caused the outage, with at least 100 vehicles affected.
The cars did not execute expected fail-safe protocols that should have guided them to safe stopping locations, instead halting exactly where they were, including in the fast lanes of expressways.
Passengers reported being unable to reach customer service for extended periods, with one rider telling Bloomberg he was trapped in a robotaxi on an expressway for nearly two hours before police arranged for someone to manually drive the vehicle to safety.
Rear-end collisions were reported in several cases where following vehicles did not anticipate a stationary robotaxi in a travel lane.
No serious injuries have been disclosed.
Technical observers cited in multiple reports believe the failure originated in Baidu's cloud-based dispatch and communications infrastructure rather than individual vehicle computers, creating a single point of failure that propagated simultaneously across the entire fleet.
The incident is particularly damaging because Wuhan was Apollo Go's flagship deployment, home to more than 1,000 driverless vehicles that completed 3.4 million fully autonomous rides in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone.
The freeze also carries implications for Baidu's international expansion.
The company has partnerships with Uber and Lyft to bring Apollo Go vehicles to London and has launched services in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where its robotaxis recently became available through the Uber app.
Rivals Pony.ai and WeRide said their fleets continue to operate normally and expressed support for the government's safety review.
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Officials have not given a timeline for when new licence approvals will resume.
The suspension marks the most significant regulatory intervention in China's autonomous vehicle sector to date and comes as governments worldwide grapple with how to oversee fleets of centrally managed driverless vehicles that can fail in ways fundamentally different from human-driven cars.The recap
- China suspends new autonomous vehicle licenses following Baidu incident
- Dozens of Apollo Go robotaxis froze in Wuhan traffic
- Wuhan operations paused and license timeline remains unclear
