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>Well that sucks big time. One of the main reasons I used Uber was I know what it's going to cost me, upfront, no matter what, I just click

And I can't care less about this change, when estimate was for £5-£7 but actual price was £8.80. Estimate never worked for me, only once in several trips in last 2 years actual price was in range of the estimates.

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The change makes Uber work in California how it already worked in the UK. As in, the way youre complaining about.

Surely by now they can upgrade their estimate algorithm, given how many trips they can analyse.

This isn't how Uber, or indeed any competently-written service, works. I'd be beyond shocked if there was some hard-coded algorithm for estimating fares that they do one-off manual upgrades on. It's far more likely that they have a statistical method for doing so, that's constantly doing the equivalent of the "upgrade" you're describing. Such systems have nonzero error.

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