That's strange, although I tested it on top of automake-1.16.5, I don't have any failure on `make check` with this one here [1].

May you provide more details ?

[1]

============================================================================
Testsuite summary for GNU Automake 1.16.5
============================================================================
# TOTAL: 2980
# PASS:  2882
# SKIP:  60
# XFAIL: 38
# FAIL:  0
# XPASS: 0
# ERROR: 0
============================================================================