China Halts New Robotaxi Permits After Baidu Apollo Go Wuhan Outage

Chinese regulators on April 29, 2026 halted the issuance of new Level 4 autonomous-vehicle permits, freezing the country's robotaxi expansion after roughly 100 Baidu Apollo Go vehicles stalled simultaneously on the streets of Wuhan in late March. The freeze blocks Baidu, Pony.ai and WeRide from adding cars to their fleets, starting new test programs or expanding into new cities — with no timeline given for resumption.

What Happened

Bloomberg first reported the regulatory action on April 29, citing sources familiar with the decision. The trigger was an incident on March 31, 2026, when more than 100 Apollo Go robotaxis froze on busy Wuhan roads at the same time, leaving passengers stranded for as long as two hours. SOS buttons inside the cars returned an unavailability message and customer-service numbers were automatically disconnected, according to riders quoted in Chinese media.

Apollo Go is China's largest commercial robotaxi operator, with more than 1,000 fully driverless vehicles deployed in Wuhan alone and 20 million cumulative rides recorded nationally as of February 2026. Baidu's Wuhan operations remain suspended pending investigation, and the company has not given a date for restarting service in the city.

Key Details

• Permit freeze covers all of China. Operators cannot register new vehicles, launch new test cities or expand existing fleets while the suspension holds.
• Level 4 only. The pause specifically targets Level 4 autonomous-driving permits, where a human is not required to intervene; lower-tier driver-assist programs are unaffected.
• Stock impact was immediate. Baidu (BIDU) fell roughly 2% in overnight trading on April 29, Pony.ai (PONY) dropped 5.7% and WeRide (WRD) fell 2.8%, according to Stocktwits.
• Apollo Go fleet size. More than 1,000 driverless vehicles in Wuhan; 20 million cumulative rides nationally through February 2026.
• Wuhan operations remain suspended. Baidu has provided no restart timeline.

What Developers and Users Are Saying

Reaction across the autonomous-driving community has been blunt. Riders quoted by Reuters and the South China Morning Post said the SOS buttons in the stalled cars produced unavailability messages and customer-service calls were automatically disconnected — a failure mode that engineers on Hacker News flagged as a basic redundancy oversight. Several commenters pointed out that any system designed for driverless operation should treat fleet-wide simultaneous failure as the threat model, not as an edge case.

Industry rivals moved quickly to reassure customers. Pony.ai said in a statement that its “robotaxi services in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are currently operating normally” and that “preparation work in Changsha and Hangzhou is also progressing as planned.” WeRide said its “robotaxi services in China are still operating as normal” and now cover more than 1,000 square kilometres, roughly 386 square miles. Neither company has had its existing permits revoked — the freeze applies only to new licensing.

What This Means for Developers

For autonomous-driving teams operating in China, the practical impact is immediate. Roadmaps that depended on launching in a new city in Q2 or Q3 of 2026 are now blocked indefinitely. Companies will likely shift effort toward simulation, fleet-wide reliability engineering and improved emergency-response systems — precisely the failure modes that triggered the Wuhan incident. International players watching China's robotaxi expansion as a leading indicator for U.S. and EU regulation should expect similar “simultaneous failure” testing requirements to become standard.

For the open-source Apollo project at github.com/ApolloAuto/apollo, the regulatory pause is unlikely to slow upstream development — the platform itself is widely deployed beyond Apollo Go — but post-incident patches addressing fleet-wide failover are now a near-certainty.

What's Next

Chinese regulators have not announced a timeline for resuming new permits. Baidu's Wuhan service remains suspended pending investigation, and the company has said only that it is “cooperating with the relevant authorities.” Watch for: official root-cause analysis from Baidu, any forthcoming nationwide reliability standard from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and statements from rivals signalling whether existing permits will be re-validated under new rules.

Sources

• South China Morning Post — First confirmed reporting from sources familiar with the decision.
• Automotive World — Industry coverage with regulator detail.
• CNBC — April 1 reporting on the original Wuhan stalling incident.
• Stocktwits — Stock-market impact for BIDU, PONY and WRD.
• The Star — April 29 wire coverage with Pony.ai and WeRide statements.
• DigiTimes — Industry analysis from Taiwan-based outlet.