There seems to be no end in sight for Uber’s endless parade of PR nightmares, with recent footage sent to Bloomberg showing a heated argument between an Uber driver and the CEO regarding the decreasing price of Uber Black fares.
The argument is captured through a grainy dashboard camera after a ride CEO Travis Kalanick shares with two female friends. At the end of the ride, Kalanick makes to leave, saying “good to see you man” to the driver, Fawzi Kamel, but Kamel presses the CEO into further conversation. At first the two have a good-natured discussion, then eventually Kamel states: “You’re raising the standards, and you’re dropping the prices.”
Kalanick protests that Uber isn’t dropping the prices on black cars, then Kamel returns that the prices are dropping in general.
“We have to; we have competitors; otherwise, we’d go out of business,” says Kalanick, adding later on in the conversation: “We started high-end. We didn’t go low-end because we wanted to. We went low-end because we had to because we’d be out of business.”
Kalanick begins to really lose his temper when Kamel says the fare prices for black cars have indeed dropped, saying “bullshit.”
“We started with $20. How much is the mile now, $2.75?” asks Kamel.
Kalanick responds by slamming the door after saying: “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!”
Among other things, Uber’s recent crises include the politically-motivated #DeleteUber campaign (resulting in over 200,000 accounts lost), allegations of a deeply sexist culture that were quickly supported many of Uber’s female engineers and a lawsuit from Google’s self-driving car division Waymo alleging the theft of trade secrets.
Source: Bloomberg
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