from Hacker News

Uber charges driver for completing a 13-mile fare

by bbatsell on 5/30/21, 11:37 PM with 132 comments

  • by mullingitover on 5/31/21, 1:25 AM

    Uber's handling of edge cases is...something.

    My wife is banned for life from Uber because after she was overcharged by a driver by $80 (for a five minute ride), and after Uber denied her dispute of the fraudulent charge, she flagged the fraudulent charge with the credit card company and got refunded via that route. I don't think a human was in the loop for any step of this process on Uber's end.

  • by PragmaticPulp on 5/31/21, 2:11 AM

    Obviously, the system shouldn’t be allowing negative fares to occur. Uber needs to eat the cost on those and provide some minimum payout floor for the driver.

    The driver posted more details further down in the thread showing some of the charges: https://twitter.com/TheSofaaa/status/1399070201925312512?s=2... Ironically, the negative balance appears to be due to regulatory fees applied haphazardly. This includes a $5 surcharge from the airport and two charges from the city of Chicago.

    It seems like the correct solution would be to pass those charges to the customer, not the driver. I don’t know how they came up with the idea of charging the driver.

  • by bbatsell on 5/30/21, 11:40 PM

    Here are screenshots of the “service fees”:

    https://twitter.com/TheSofaaa/status/1399070201925312512?s=2...

  • by strken on 5/31/21, 1:01 AM

    It's a bit terrifying that people on twitter seem to think this is an intentional product decision rather than a bug plus shitty automated support with no human in the loop.

    I guess if you keep setting OKRs like "5% lower support call volume" for years then at some point your reputational risk goes up because you've made it impossible to contact an actual human being.

  • by sp332 on 5/31/21, 12:14 AM

  • by choward on 5/31/21, 3:49 AM

    Why is everyone so concerned that the earnings was a negative amount of money? Instead of being charged, the driver only got paid $0.01. Would that be okay? In a way the driver is still getting charged because the gas alone is more than that. If this is just one example, imagine all the drivers who don't get a negative earnings but end up spending more than they make. The real question is what number is okay and how do you calculate it.

  • by zaroth on 5/31/21, 1:55 AM

    Another Uber bug I ran into a couple weeks ago.

    I had a long trip which I updated after departing to be a short trip. After getting out of the Uber I clicked to pay a 20% tip, and it paid it on the original (much higher) amount. Worked out to be almost a 100% tip.

    I called support, walked the very nice woman through what happened, she filed a bug report and reset the tip to a normal amount.

  • by missedthecue on 5/31/21, 3:33 AM

    I wonder if modern rates of depression are normal, and we're just diagnosing cases more accurately, or if more people are becoming depressives.

    I haven't got data, and I'm not an expert in this field, but it feels to me like the latter is what's happening. If this is the case, I wonder what is causing it, and how it can be remediated. I don't remember so many people being depressed when I was young.

  • by davidhyde on 5/31/21, 1:29 AM

    13.5 miles in 16 minutes. Including stopping? That seems a little quick. Perhaps it was an automatically charged speeding fine ;)

  • by jdkee on 5/31/21, 4:41 AM

    Uber needs to be mandated an employer in every US state and made to follow the existing laws.

    Otherwise throw the management in jail.

  • by encryptluks2 on 5/31/21, 1:10 AM

    It will take massive fines and employment regulation to change anything. Uber will continue and defend this type of behavior until they're made to do otherwise.

  • by _eqet on 5/31/21, 2:24 AM

    People try to take any chance to make a villian out of big tech, it's just a damn bug people!

    They might not be the most decent "being", but the fact that this post is trending bothers me