Radish Run halts in Wuhan late at night, questioning the Robotaxi emergency response system

Interface News reporter | Weekend

Interface News editor | Wen Shuqі

“I got out—where am I supposed to go? The cars on both sides are coming really fast.”

On the evening of March 31 at around 9:00 p.m., on the elevated Wuhan Ring Expressway (Third Ring), a Robotaxi autonomous-driving taxi operated by Luobo Kuaipao that passenger Xiao Wang was riding on made a sudden emergency stop after about ten minutes of normal travel. The vehicle pulled to a stop in the middle of the main roadway on the elevated highway. Afterwards, entertainment functions such as in-car music also shut down. He tried pressing the “Call Trip Specialist” button on the in-car display. After the screen briefly showed “Call in progress,” the call automatically ended. The SOS button on the vehicle roof and the phone hotline also received no response.

The Wuhan Ring Expressway (Third Ring) is a fully enclosed elevated expressway that circles the central urban area of Wuhan. It is made up of interchange elevated sections across two Yangtze River crossings and one Hanshui River crossing. It forms the main transportation backbone of Wuhan. Footage from the scene that Xiao Wang recorded shows that, on both sides of the stopped vehicles, passenger cars and large trucks continuously pass at high speed.

After waiting nearly thirty minutes inside the vehicle in the middle of the elevated roadway, customer service only called back via the car system and told Xiao Wang that the vehicle had a fault and that personnel would be arranged to take over. The vehicle then drove itself from the main elevated roadway onto the service road, and the screen showed “Personnel will arrive within five minutes.” He told Interface News that, after waiting more than another hour, at 10:40 p.m. he placed a call to the traffic police himself. Only after the arriving traffic police and Luobo Kuaipao staff then manually drove the Robotaxi was he taken to his destination.

A trip that originally should have taken 15 minutes ultimately took nearly two hours.

Xiao Wang was not the only passenger stuck that night. Another passenger, Xiao Zhang, told Interface News that during the same period, the Luobo Kuaipao Robotaxi he was riding also stopped at a city-road intersection due to a “network fault.” Within his line of sight, at least 3 Robotaxis on the same road were flashing hazard lights with their vehicles parked in place. A private car driver nearby reminded him that an additional vehicle was also stopped on the opposite side of the road.

In the early hours of April 1, Wuhan Municipal Public Security Bureau’s Traffic Management Department released a police situation bulletin: starting at 8:57 p.m. on March 31, the 122 alarm center had received reports from the public one after another, saying that multiple “Luobo Kuaipao” vehicles were stopped in the middle of the road and could not move. Public security traffic management and transportation departments quickly mobilized personnel to arrive at the scene according to the emergency plan, and worked with Luobo Kuaipao company staff to carry out the response. After investigation, the preliminary judgment was that it was caused by a system fault. At present, passengers have safely gotten off the vehicle, and no one was injured. The cause of the incident is still under further investigation.

Luobo Kuaipao is an autonomous driving mobility service platform under Baidu. It operates based on Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving technology system. Baidu’s latest financial report shows that as of February 2026, Luobo Kuaipao’s cumulative ride services have exceeded 20 million trips. The platform has launched operations in 26 cities worldwide, with cumulative autonomous driving mileage exceeding 300 million kilometers. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the platform’s fully autonomous driving orders reached 3.4 million in a single quarter, up 209% year over year.

Wuhan is one of Luobo Kuaipao’s largest single-city operating markets globally. In 2019, Baidu obtained the first batch of global autonomous driving commercial licenses in Wuhan. In 2022, Wuhan issued the first national batch of unmanned demonstration operation qualifications to Baidu, allowing no safety attendants in vehicles, operation on public roads, and the provision of commercial services. After that, Luobo Kuaipao rapidly expanded in Wuhan.

At Baidu’s financial results briefing for the second quarter of 2025, CEO Robin Li Yanhong confirmed that Luobo Kuaipao in Wuhan has achieved “UE turning profitable.” This means the daily per-vehicle operating revenue of Robotaxis covers their costs, and is seen as a key profit indicator that makes it possible to continue expanding the fleet size without increasing losses.

Xiao Wang told Interface News that he has been using Luobo Kuaipao’s Robotaxi App for more than a year. “From the experience, it’s very comfortable,” he said, because “the pricing is very reasonable, the car is quiet, and there’s no bad smell.” Another passenger told Interface News that in daily life they also frequently take Luobo Kuaipao Robotaxis, and after similar fault incidents, staff arrived on site quickly. He speculated that this time staff didn’t respond promptly “because the whole city was shut down at the same time—it was too busy, probably in that kind of nonstop, impossible-to-handle state.”

Robotaxis are a typical “strong policy-dependent” industry. Starting in 2025, several major autonomous driving hubs in China began issuing related policies in clusters, and the main autonomous driving taxi companies all announced that after reaching the “turning point” of key profit indicators, they would continue to expand.

Wang Haojun, CFO of autonomous driving taxi company Pony.ai, described this expansion pace as “exponential growth” at a media briefing earlier. He told Interface News and other media that what underpins this confidence is what he calls “more confidence in more cities,” and “the confidence provided on the regulatory side”—for example, some cities where earlier policies had stayed on paper have begun to be implemented in practice.

But the other side of scale expansion is the simultaneous jump in operational complexity. The Wuhan incident on the evening of March 31 shows that when a certain scale of Robotaxis experiences system faults at the same time, the pressure placed on the emergency response system also increases.

As of the time of publication, Luobo Kuaipao has not yet released an official announcement or issued an external statement regarding this incident. Interface News asked Luobo Kuaipao about the cause of the accident; as of the time of publication, it had not received a response.

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