“Trust your gut”: Woman issues warning after Uber driver sped, ignored warnings, and scared her to tears

A travel TikToker shared a harrowing experience she had with a strange and erratic Uber driver after returning home from a long trip. According to this woman, the driver arrived playing some rather unusual music, then started singing along—and that wasn’t the scary part.

The Uber driver from hell

TikToker Lauren (@laurenslens) said on Thursday that she and her sister had the worst Uber experience of their lives recently, which is really something coming from a travel vlogger. The two women had just returned from London, flying into the LAX airport, so they were naturally exhausted.

With rush hour traffic and the usual chaos of this airport, getting an Uber took a while. When one finally showed up for them, the red flags were raised immediately.

“We get in the car, and the guy is maybe mid-30s, and he’s playing some obscure music,” she said. “It’s a type of music I’d never really heard before.”

This wasn’t the part of the ride that really bothered her, even when he started singing along. The real horrors started when they got into traffic.

“We notice that he is really tailing people pretty hard and not stopping,” she continued.

“He is not stopping until the very last second. The car is like beeping at him to stop and he still doesn’t stop until it’s like, okay, are we about to hit someone right now?”

Lauren acknowledged that LA traffic requires some aggressive driving, but this was excessive. She started to get a terrible gut feeling and shared that with her sister, who pointed out that the car’s tire and oil lights were on. Then she noticed how bumpy the ride was—the way it feels when the tired are alarmingly bald.

They ended up rerouting the Uber to her sister’s boyfriend’s place, 15 minutes away, because they felt so unsafe. Luckily, they arrived there without getting in an accident or otherwise suffering harm. However, they had to call an expensive Uber Black just to feel safe getting the rest of the way home.

She ended the video by reporting that Uber declined to refund her sister for the first ride.

@laurenslens friendly reminder to always stay vigilant + trust your gut. in all my years of taking @Uber quite literally all over the world, I’ve never had an experience this bad #travelhorrorstory #travelreality #uberstories #creatorsearchinsights ♬ original sound – Lauren | Travel Inspo + Recs

“Uber should definitely refund you”

Frequent Uber drivers may not experience surprise when finding out that the TikTok comments are full of other Uber horror stories.

“Dude I had this experience going to the airport too and the back fender was flapping, all engine lights on and he was driving so close to the cars ahead and darting between cars too closely and honestly was worried of what was gonna happen,” wrote @caitlin__heather.

“My son and his gf called an uber from summerlin in Vegas to the airport. The driver was seriously hung over and fell asleep 2x!” claimed @wonder.woman.world.

Others agreed that Uber needed to make things right or expressed relief that she and her sister survived.

“Uber should definitely refund you,” said @sillymilly445. “Bad reflection on their company.”

Commenter @dhruviimodi wrote that “this sucks omg, I’m so glad you two were safe though.”

The Daily Dot has reached out to @laurenslens via TikTok and Uber via email.