China has begun issuing robotaxi permits again, ending a three-month freeze that halted new autonomous driving licences since April. Momenta and Baidu—the latter of which was behind the incident that triggered the stoppage—are among the first operators to receive them, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg.

The suspension followed a mass outage on 31 March, wherein more than 100 Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis stalled simultaneously across Wuhan, many of them on busy motorways. Passengers were left stranded for up to two hours as in-car SOS systems failed and customer service calls went unanswered. At least three collisions involving other road users colliding with the stopped vehicles were reported in the aftermath.

Regulators first imposed the freeze on 29 April with no timeline for resumption, ordering operators to conduct industry-wide safety reviews. This had the effect of stopping new robotaxi deployment entirely in China, unless permitted immediately before the stop. However, that review concluded in late June, and permits are now returning gradually on a city-by-city basis rather than all at once.

Shenzhen was first to move, amending its connected vehicle rules to lower the barriers for new robotaxi deployment. The municipal government is also exploring the possibility of opening the entire city to robotaxis rather than restricted geofenced zones. Momenta was among the first to receive a new licence there. In Wuhan itself, residents have been posting footage of Apollo Go cars back on the roads since early July, some of them still carrying safety drivers. Baidu shares rose 4.1% on the news, with Pony.ai and WeRide also benefitting.

Notably, neither Baidu nor the government has disclosed what actually caused the March outage. As the incident was unfolding, it was attributed rather ambiguously to a server problem. WeRide, for its part, said it welcomed a “clear, stable and predictable regulatory environment,” while Beijing is separately drafting rules to govern higher-level autonomous driving.

This is not the first time a Baidu-linked incident has triggered a freeze: a similar suspension in late 2024, driven by public anger over job displacement, was not lifted until early 2025. Both episodes reflect a pattern of the Chinese enforcing hard pauses before resuming just as firmly. Whatever safety issues may or may not have been identified, the country is clearly unwilling to slow its underlying push for autonomous driving leadership against rivals like Waymo.

That the government resumed permits without ever explaining the Wuhan failure is itself the clearest signal of intent: Beijing has decided the incident was a containable operational problem rather than one calling the technology’s readiness into question. Thus, it is choosing scale over full transparency. 

Shenzhen’s move toward city-wide operation, not the permit resumption itself, is the change likely to matter most, since it expands the operating envelope in which Chinese robotaxi fleets can turn accumulated technical capability into commercial scale.