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
============================================================================