>In a lot of countries (80%+) taxi drivers are rude, try to price gouge, try to scam you or try to take longer routes.
I have had every experience you explained with Uber. People driving me weird ways around my city to make the trip longer, rude, attempting to add a cleaning charge with no reason, or the classic "Hey if you cancel the ride and give me $10 I can get you there."
How? Uber is a current-year tech company. Like Google, there technically is a support line that technically exists, but just forget about it.
I called Uber 10 times, in Houston. Got scammed 5 times. Part of the "the driver just keeps driving and never acknowledges letting you out of the car" scam is that the app takes the same approach to "uh, I'm not in the car anymore" as it does to "uh, I would like to complain to Uber". (The way to say that the ride has ended is to cancel the trip, an operation that feels like you're trying to scam the driver, so an honest person will avoid doing that while searching for the nonexistent "the ride has ended" UI.)
4/5 scams: the driver goes past your position and then waits a mile down the road to pick you up. The moment the driver was near, Uber switches to "ok go get in the car" mode. It never switches out of it. If you cancel, rather than hike an unreasonable distance to catch the car that deliberately drove past you, then Uber charges you $5.
I don't believe you. No offense, but it's easier to learn that the Earth is flat, or that a place called 'Australia' exists, or that reality is entirely a consensus affair and that strenuous wishing can change it, than it is to learn that Uber is easy to contact. Some lies people don't bother spreading.
If you lucked out and found that your specific issue had a UI entry in the app, that's not the same thing as being able to explain a situation to a human and have that human do the (paid, drudge) work of wading through obscure interfaces to find the button that fixes a given problem.
Why do you trust it? You got into a car on an arranged deal and the driver immediately wants to back out of it--this is already a shady situation. Why do you think he'll drive you anywhere after he gets the $10? Why do you think he won't charge you for the trip on top of the $10 after alerting Uber to their own GPS records that show your phone and his car taking you to the destination you said you wanted to go to?
I would never pay for a ride in someone's car before the ride completed. Taxis don't expect that; who does this guy think he is? If he wants something up front he's out of luck. In fact I probably would reject the offer as I suggested above, but if I accepted I would immediately cancel the trip. If Uber want to charge for a cancelled trip they can bite my ass.
It is probably "privilege" as a big heavy white dude with a perpetually surly expression that I'm not alerting on "danger" in such a situation. If I were a different person I could totally imagine reporting the driver and trying to get him fired. People worry when getting in strangers' cars. Actually once in India I did get such a misdirected cab ride, but my Indian friend noticed and convinced the cab driver to stop. He chewed the driver's ass for a while, then we got another cab.
I have had every experience you explained with Uber. People driving me weird ways around my city to make the trip longer, rude, attempting to add a cleaning charge with no reason, or the classic "Hey if you cancel the ride and give me $10 I can get you there."