Chinese Uber driver threatens to break passenger’s legs

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Chinese news site Sina Tech got an interesting report from a reader yesterday. A female Uber user from Beijing told the site that she had tried to book an Uber earlier in the day. However, the app’s location data for the driver wasn’t correct – he was further away than indicated – so she consulted with the driver and then canceled the ride. The driver apparently wasn’t happy, and threatened her over the phone: “if you were a man, I would drive over there and break your legs.”

Tech in Asia has contacted Uber for comment on this story and will update if we hear back. Uber reps told Sina Tech that the company was investigating and would severely punish the driver if he’s found to have violated the company’s behavioral standards.

A driver threatening to break a passenger’s legs sounds bad for Uber, but it certainly could be worse. A Didi Hitch carpooling driver robbed and murdered a 24-year-old primary school teacher earlier this month.

Business as usual?

What’s most interesting about this latest incident, though, is the public reaction. China’s net users are so used to driver shenanigans at this point that there’s little surprise, shock, or interest in comparing Didi and Uber anymore. Instead, commenters see it as a symptom of a larger problem: nobody has drivers that are as friendly as passengers would prefer.

One of the most popular comments on this latest story, for example, comes from a Zhejiang-based commenter named Chafeng, who wrote: “At its core, it’s an illegal cab that’s wearing the internet as a disguise. The taxi problem hasn’t been solved, now the ride-hailing problem has popped up again. But really at its core this is still a driver problem.”

Some users are already wondering whether this is just the way it’s going to be.

Everybody seems to agree that the problem affects all of the platforms. Another popular commenter says that he was harassed and insulted by a Didi driver for the same reason this Uber user was: canceling a ride order.

Over the past year, under pressure from both passengers and the government, both Didi and Uber have tightened their driver-hiring policies and introduced new training programs to try to improve users’ customer experiences. It might seem like there’s still more work to be done on that front, but some users are already wondering whether this is just the way it’s going to be.

After all, there were and still are plenty of poorly-mannered taxi cab drivers. Ride-hailing apps may give users more oversight and drivers more immediate feedback on their behavior, but with millions of people hailing private cars in China each day, at least a few are bound to run into jerks behind the wheel, right?