Apollo Go Robotaxi Network
Baidu's Apollo Go (萝卜快跑) began carrying passengers with a safety driver in Wuhan in May 2022; by August 2022 the city became the first in China with fully driverless commercial robotaxi rides, initially across 13km² of the Economic and Technological Development Zone. The service is now Baidu's largest single-city deployment, covering more than 3,000km² by the company's own account — though Wuhan's own transportation bureau put the active fleet at 400 vehicles in 2025 and called widely circulated claims of 1,000+ 'rumors.' Undercutting taxi fares by roughly 60-75% (4-16 yuan per 10km against 18-30 yuan) has fed a genuine driver-livelihood backlash. On 31 March 2026 a cloud-side fleet-management outage froze over 100 Apollo Go cars simultaneously across the city for up to two hours, with silent in-car SOS systems leaving passengers stranded; the incident triggered a nationwide freeze on new autonomous-driving permits from 29 April 2026, lifted only after an industry-wide safety review completed in late June 2026, with vehicles — some still carrying safety drivers — reappearing on Wuhan's streets from early July.
📊 Impact
Wuhan's transportation bureau counted 400 active Apollo Go vehicles in 2025, disputing widely repeated claims of 1,000+; fares run 4-16 yuan per 10km against 18-30 yuan for a traditional taxi (Sixth Tone, 2025). On 31 March 2026 over 100 vehicles froze simultaneously in a cloud-outage incident that led to a nationwide permit freeze from 29 April to late June 2026.
🎓 Lesson
A cloud-side software failure — not a vehicle's sensors or driving logic — was enough to freeze a fleet across an entire city and pause a national industry.
📖 Terms in this entry: Adaptive traffic signals · CBTC (communications-based train control) · Digital twin
Sources
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Apollo Go Robotaxi Network” — Wuhan, China. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/wuhan-apollo-go-robotaxi/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.