China stopped issuing new robotaxi licenses over a glitch. America can’t stop them from rolling into active shooter situations

On March 31, over a hundred of Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxis simultaneously froze on the streets of Wuhan. Vehicles stalled on overpasses and elevated roads, trapping passengers for up to two hours.

A few weeks later, Beijing suspended all new autonomous driving permits nationwide. The suspension suspension blocked robotaxi companies from adding to their fleets, starting new tests, or expanding to additional cities, according to Bloomberg.

In the U.S., meanwhile, some autonomous vehicles are driving into street lights and even into the middle of ongoing crime scenes. In just one month in Austin, Tesla’s robotaxis crashed into a fixed object head on and in reverse, while also hitting trees, poles, buses and trucks. Waymo’s robotaxis are incapable of closing their own doors—and the company has taken to hiring DoorDashers to door dash and close the doors after a passenger gets out. In October 2023, a Cruise AV dragged a pedestrian 20 feet.

During the June 2025 anti-ICE protests in downtown Los Angeles, demonstrators smashed, spray-painted, and torched at least six Waymo robotaxis. The cars reportedly honked in unison as they burned, as activists claimed the cars’ camera data was shared with the LAPD and was representative of the surveillance state. As a result, Waymo suspended service in the downtown area and went on to pause service during subsequent protests. Still, no federal regulation followed.

In February this year, a Waymo blew past cop cars at a live crime scene in Atlanta. A month later, another blocked ambulances in Austin during an active shooter situation.

In L.A. in December, a Waymo was observed driving into an active crime scene; the driverless tech was unable to navigate the officer’s directions to reroute and leave the scene.

That month also witnessed probably the closest parallel to what occurred in Wuhan. A major power outage knocked out traffic signals across San Francisco, leading to Waymo’s fleet of 800-1,000 robotaxis blocking roads and impeding emergency vehicles. At a March 2 hearing about what happened to the fleet during the power outage, San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management Executive Director Mary Ellen Carroll expressed outrage.

“What has started to happen is that our public safety officers and responders are having to be the ones to physically move” the robotaxis, Carroll said. “In a sense, they’re becoming a default roadside assistance for these vehicles, which we do not think is tenable.” 

Waymo has since shipped a software update to the AVs, but there’s still no federal regulation.

States are trying to get cars off the road

The U.S. has no federal autonomous vehicle safety law. The SELF DRIVE Act of 2026, a bipartisan House bill, would create the first statute, yet it remains a draft. Earlier versions in 2017 and 2021 died without passage.

While federal regulation stalls, a separate movement is gaining traction at the state level: legislation to reduce how much Americans drive. The Brookings Institution found that California, Minnesota, Colorado, and Oregon now have laws requiring transportation agencies to mitigate vehicle miles traveled. In Colorado, this has already redirected $900 million from highway expansion toward bus rapid transit. Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are considering similar bills in 2026.

Autonomous vehicles deployed at scale are widely expected to increase total driving: empty robotaxis cruising between fares, commuters choosing longer trips, freight trucks running around the clock.

But Tony Han, founder and CEO of Chinese robotaxi startup WeRide, said at the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh that AVs likely will never be 100% safe, but they would be 10 times safer than humans within a decade.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com