Why your Uber app is lying to you about available cars

This article is outdated and it's simply incorrect. There are no phantom cars, there were caching issues previously but they should have been resolved.

The support representative's response is wrong and appears to have been contrived. When you're dealing with support volume on the scale of Uber, you're bound to get some tickets that are answered incorrectly.

Other than having access to some internal tools for account lookups, support staff at Uber (and many other companies) do not know anything more than what is publicly available. It's why an Apple live chat saying "yes, iPhone 7 will have a larger screen" means nothing.

When I open the app it has some cars on the screen and tells me the time estimate for someone to get to my location. As long as the time estimate is correct, do I care where on the screen the cars are?

This is blogspam from last summer. The original article was posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9958852.