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Ask HN: What is your worst or unusual Uber experience?

6 points by wongwf82 ↗ HN
I've hailed a driver who didn't ring me to say he was on his way. Then I see that he is taking the longer routes to my place, doing U-turns and finally when he is just a few roads a way, he ends up taking a wrong turn and joins a long queue for the traffic. I couldn't ring him because his mobile ran out of battery (which I later found out when we finally met). I just kept seeing him stumble on the Uber map while we're rushing to get to a place.

After 25 minutes of wait, I gave up waiting and drove out to find him (using the Uber map to track him down). I finally bumped into him coming from opposite side and he followed my car home before we could start our journey elsewhere. So time spent before we got on the Uber car = 35 minutes.

4 comments

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bzalasky
I was visiting Chicago (from SF) for a wedding and needed to get from downtown to Lake Forest. My UberX driver rolled up in the oldest, jankiest car I've ever seen associated with Uber. The driver then proceeded to start going south on Lakeshore Drive. I told him he was going the wrong way, then we did an illegal u-turn and then started making our way north. There was a bit of traffic but we finally got moving. We were on a straight path to my destination when he randomly exited and started taking a different route and got us stuck in traffic again. When I called him on it, he got indecisive about what to do and then continued driving. After about two hours, I made it to my destination. He had really good reggae music on the whole time.
wongwf82
How much did you rate the driver? When I was waiting for my driver to arrive (about 20 minutes in), I was prepared to rate him 1 star. Then I just felt bad that he may lose his job and so stuck with 3 stars.

I see the problem is Uber sometimes do not do proper quality control. In my country where they're starting up, the drivers do not always ring to say they are on their way (some I have to ring them first) and some offer drinks, while others don't. Usually they tend to be very unfamiliar with the roads and takes longer than the 15 minutes estimate to arrive. I can see in your case, the driver doesn't know the best route to get to your destination.

Uber can probably improve this by helping the driver decide the best route there while avoiding getting stuck in traffic.

And I've always wondered what happens if my phone runs out of battery before the driver arrives.. so that is why the driver MUST ring after the customer puts in an order request!

smeyer
I'm in Boston, and the drivers rarely ring after putting in an order request. This works fine for me, because the vast majority of the time there are no issues, and then if they get there and can't find me, they can call. I'll also call or text them if I notice they seem to be having issues taking the right route to me. For me this works better than adding an extra phone call to every transaction.
bzalasky
I gave him a 2 because the music was great. But he couldn't represent the Uber brand with the car he was driving... and there were quite a few mishaps on the ride, as I mentioned.