Author：Wall Street CN
Xiao Lu, a 26-year-old resident of Wuhan, is a heavy user of "Radish Express" Robotaxi (driverless taxis). At 8:30 p.m. on March 31, he hailed a driverless car to go to his company. While on the Third Ring Road elevated highway, the car suddenly braked, but Xiao Lu assumed it was cutting in line and didn't pay much attention. The car started moving again shortly after and then stopped in the middle of the elevated highway.
Xiao Lu immediately pressed the SOS button in the car, but the call could not be connected. At 9:30 p.m., the customer service of Luobo Express finally got through and said that it was due to a "network failure" and told him to wait where he was.
The car door could be opened, and theoretically, traffic management departments would usually advise the person involved to leave the vehicle as soon as possible in such a situation. However, with constant traffic outside and trucks honking as they passed by, Xiao Lu was afraid to open the door and didn't know where to go after getting out. Robotaxi is beginning to face the costs of scaling up.
He contacted the platform multiple times over the next hour, and the response was always that the staff had already set off and would arrive shortly. He also called the traffic police, who arrived at the scene around 10:40 p.m. and safely escorted him off the overpass.
Afterwards, the platform's customer service contacted Xiao Lu to offer compensation, initially a 50% off coupon, which was later changed to "two free ride coupons, each with a maximum value of 20 yuan." Xiao Lu could not accept this and wanted an explanation from the platform for why she was trapped on the elevated highway for nearly two hours.
Xiao Lu wasn't the only one trapped. Starting at 8:57 PM that evening, multiple driverless vehicles stopped on elevated sections of the Wuhan Second Ring Road, including the Yangsigang Yangtze River Bridge, Baishazhou Bridge, and the Third Ring Road, causing some rear-end collisions. A video from Shanghai's The Paper showed that at least a hundred "Radish Express" vehicles were affected. Early the following morning, Wuhan traffic police reported that no one was injured and the cause was still under investigation.
We understand that another city where Robotaxi is being piloted is organizing companies to study the incident and hold special meetings to prevent similar incidents from happening again.
As of press time, Baidu, the company behind Luobo Kuaipao, has not issued a public response. Sources familiar with public incident handling procedures speculate that the company will only respond after the relevant authorities have reached a preliminary investigation conclusion.
A ride-hailing driver in Wuhan told us that he once encountered a "Radish Express" (a ride-hailing service) stopped on the ring road during a heavy rainstorm, where traffic was very heavy. Their biggest complaint about "Radish Express" wasn't that they were taking away passengers, but rather that "they would often stop in the middle of the road and refuse to move."
Publicly available information shows that Robotaxi has cloud-based safety officer monitoring capabilities, allowing one safety officer to monitor multiple Robotaxi vehicles simultaneously. Sources close to Baidu suggest that such a large-scale vehicle shutdown could indicate a problem with the operational dispatch system.
Another colleague expressed a similar view: Robotaxi operations typically experience a lane-stopping malfunction only once every few hundred thousand or millions of kilometers, and the simultaneous malfunction of nearly a hundred vehicles is an extremely low probability event.
The operational requirements for robotaxi are more sophisticated than those for regular ride-hailing services. In the event of a minor collision, passengers in a ride-hailing service can get out and leave, and the driver knows how to handle the situation; however, robotaxi has no driver, and every step after a system malfunction—whether to continue moving, pull over, or wait for assistance—must be based on a standardized procedure.
The Robotaxi industry has adopted a concept from aviation safety engineering: fail-safe. This is a systems engineering design approach where, in the event of a malfunction, the system prioritizes stopping to minimize risk. In the context of driverless taxis, this means that if a critical component fails, the vehicle enters a protection mode and ceases operation.
The incident on the elevated highway in Wuhan exposed the limitations of fail-safe technology. Nearly a hundred vehicles stopped on the bridge, ramps, and in the middle of tunnels. Especially in elevated highway scenarios, the risk of suddenly stopping may not be less than driving with a malfunction. Whether it meets the "minimum risk state" (MRC) principle in autonomous driving safety (i.e., the vehicle should stop in a position that has less impact on passengers and the road) remains to be seen.
An industry insider told us that the ideal scenario is fail-operational. Even if the system malfunctions, the autonomous vehicle can still retain a minimum level of operational capability, continuing to drive a short distance in a low-risk manner to bring the people and vehicle to a safe location, and then wait for remote takeover or on-site rescue.
"Even if the vehicle's hardware malfunctions, there should be a redundant system to automatically pull over. Stopping in your own lane on a highway or elevated road is too dangerous," the person said.
He believes that redundant systems should be activated when autonomous vehicles malfunction. Chassis, communication, power supply, sensors, and computing platforms should ideally be configured in duplicate to avoid single points of failure; for example, LiDAR and cameras should be independent sensor systems. If the primary system fails, the backup system must also function, and remote assistance, customer service, and offline response must be readily available.
Alphabet's Waymo has also stumbled in its robotaxi operations. During the San Francisco blackout last December, several Waymo driverless taxis were stranded at intersections, causing traffic jams.
Waymo vehicles treat malfunctioning traffic lights as "stop in four directions" signs, following a "first come, first served" principle. Upon detecting a power outage, vehicles request remote confirmation before proceeding, preventing red-light running. With all traffic lights out citywide, confirmation requests surged, overwhelming the remote team and causing traffic jams at intersections.
Robotaxi is often discussed as a form of digital economy: high profit margins and scalability. Public information shows that Baidu's Robotaxi service has been launched in 22 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. Pony.ai and WeRide operate in multiple cities both domestically and internationally, and each has its own expansion plans. Hello, Didi, Cao Cao Mobility, and Ruqi Mobility have also planned their own Robotaxi products.
However, as the scale expands, competition revolves around cost per kilometer, waiting time, and reliability, easily becoming capital-intensive and regulatory-intensive. They avoid the driver management costs of traditional ride-hailing platforms, but they also incur additional costs for fleet maintenance, redundant systems, remote monitoring, and emergency response systems. Moreover, they need to be 20-30% cheaper than ride-hailing services to continuously acquire customers, and each vehicle needs at least 300 yuan in revenue per day to break even.
This competitive landscape has precedent. The aviation industry has historically enjoyed thin profit margins, container shipping has long oscillated between boom and bust, and telecommunications companies have seen their profit margins decline steadily as competition intensifies. These industries have all transformed the way the world works, but the long-term returns for their operators have been disproportionate to their dominant positions.
Having a clear vision for the future doesn't guarantee victory. But regardless of how companies compete, passengers shouldn't be the ones covering for the few times the system malfunctions.
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