The day the robotaxis froze • 3 min read TL;DR: A few days ago, over 100 Baidu robotaxis halted on highways in Wuhan, China—the second mass robotaxi failure in a little under four months. These incidents show how centralized cloud systems make robotaxis especially vulnerable to shutdowns—and reveal the lack of a clear contingency plan when an army of driverless cars goes dark at once. What happened: On Tuesday, over 100 Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis suddenly came to a stop in the middle of Wuhan’s busy, winding expressways. Though there were some collisions, no injuries have been reported, and Chinese authorities attributed the incident to a “system malfunction.” These driverless cars didn’t pull over to an emergency lane—they just halted where they were, some in the fast lane with traffic streaming past on both sides. Robotaxi systems are generally designed to pull over to a safe location when something goes wrong. In this case, they didn’t—and it’s not yet clear why. Some passengers reported that in-car SOS buttons didn’t work, and one college student told Wired it took 30 minutes to even connect to a customer service rep—and help never came. What makes robotaxis vulnerable: Robotaxi companies run their fleet on a centralized cloud with shared systems for routing, navigation, and remote assistance. When there’s a major hiccup in that infrastructure, it can take down a huge number of connected vehicles in the fleet at the same time. When the system fails, there’s not always a human driver who can grab the wheel, especially as many commercial robotaxi fleets no longer place human safety drivers (as they did during testing) in the vehicle. Robo-car crash pileup: This wasn’t the first time robotaxis have come to a standstill. Last December, when a massive blackout in San Francisco knocked out city traffic