China froze robotaxi licences after a Wuhan breakdown, then let them resume

China stopped issuing new licences for autonomous taxis after a breakdown in Wuhan, Hubei province, on the night of 31 March 2026. Several Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis came to a sudden halt on the roadway, Bloomberg reported, and some passengers were left stranded on busy elevated roads. Regulators were worried enough that in April three institutions, among them the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), called a meeting with officials from the cities running autonomous driving pilot programmes.

Fleets frozen, shares fall

The suspension of new permits barred companies from enlarging their fleets, starting new test projects or entering more cities. How long it would last was unclear. The market reaction was immediate: Baidu shares listed in Hong Kong fell by about 2 percent, Pony AI by 6 percent and WeRide by 3 percent.

Regulators told local authorities to run comprehensive independent audits and tighten safety oversight so that such incidents would not happen again. The breakdown itself was a rare case, and the company blamed it on customer service.

Licences resume after the audit

Permits started coming back gradually once the industry safety review wrapped up at the end of June. One of the first went to Momenta (HKEX: 6880), which said on 21 July that its robotaxi had been cleared for test drives in Shenzhen. Shenzhen also rewrote its local rules on intelligently connected vehicles, opening the whole city to testing and lowering the barriers to entry. Baidu Apollo Go likewise began returning to normal operation in Wuhan.

The episode shows how thin the line is between expansion and public trust in China's autonomous transport sector. Beijing promotes autonomous driving as a strategic technology. Yet after the March mishap the regulator did not hesitate to freeze the entire permits market until a common safety assessment standard was in place. For operators, that means the pace of development now depends more on audit results than on technical capability.

Chinese operators did not sit idle. Pony AI launched a commercial autonomous ride service in the Croatian city of Zagreb in April, and WeRide announced a joint project with Uber in Spain, so expansion abroad went ahead while permits stayed frozen at home. For the industry, the signal is that regulatory risk in China has become an argument for diversifying markets, not just for scaling fleets at home.