Posted on 04/01/2026 7:04:11 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Local police said initial findings suggested a "system malfunction" caused multiple vehicles to stop in the middle of the road on Tuesday.
Videos on social media have documented the outage, with one appearing to show it resulting in a highway collision, although police said no injuries had been reported and passengers exited their vehicles safely.
Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the police statement, posted on social media site Weibo, the cause of the incident is still under further investigation.
Baidu operates its Apollo Go driverless taxi service in dozens of cities across the world, mostly in China.
The outage is not the first time self-driving cars have faced technical difficulties.
In December 2025, a large power outage in San Francisco led Waymo taxis to stop working around the city, causing huge traffic jams.
Meanwhile in August 2025, an Apollo Go robotaxi carrying a passenger in Chongqing fell into a construction pit.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
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Tofu traffic control with tofu taxis..
Tesla and Elon Musk are using a completely different approach to robo taxis.
Their approach appears to be much more robust. It is based on vision, and vision based AI, using billions of miles actual visual experience in the car systems to be used for robo-taxis.
I’d bet on Tesla and Musk’s approach.
Reminds me of the good ol’ days in Tampa when the old, 2-lane “Howard Frankenstein” bridge was brought to a halt by a car breakdown. The entire bridge turned into one big street party. ... No harm, no foul!
Someone just sent the PRC a carefully worded message.
From what my brother told me after he had lived in China briefly (~6 months) several years ago, it sounds like Baidu is successfully emulating normal Chinese traffic patterns.
Where was that sh*t made? Let me guess; the same place Venezuela’s and Iran’s anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems were made. In CHYna.
🙄
I can pick up the conservative talk radio station over in Paducah, KY, and Paducah is home to the Irvin S. Cobb / “Brookport” Bridge: An almost 100 year old 10 span steel deck narrow (8 ft. vehicle width restricted) bridge over the Ohio River. Per the radio station’s news reports and traffic alerts, that bridge gets “plugged up” all the time. Usually the cause is an accident, and usually the cause of the accident is some fool semi driver who ignores the several “no semi’s” and lane restriction signs at the approaches from either end of the bridge. But, sometimes things get creative, as they did several days ago when someone tried to pull a large camper over the bridge. It took the police a few hours to get that sorted out. Other people just hit the rails along the sides of the bridge, and so on.
There are a bunch of vids about this bridge on You Tube: Here is a good one -
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=brookport+bridge
The part I like best are the views from below, looking up THROUGH the deck cars are driving on.
Olaf’s Meltdown: Frozen Robot Collapses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YQlMgNs1V4
Imagine a million of these attacking a city.
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