UberPlen­ty of Welling­to­ni­ans are get­ting excit­ed about the arrival of the rapid­ly-grow­ing qua­si-taxi ser­vice Uber. They offer the con­ve­nience of a smart­phone app, the poten­tial for bet­ter ser­vice and flex­i­bil­i­ty, a promise to dis­rupt what is often seen as a monop­o­lis­tic indus­try, plus fan­cy cars and All Blacks. For that, they’ve been reward­ed with bil­lions of dol­lars of ven­ture cap­i­tal, mak­ing them dar­lings of the start­up scene.

One Wellingo­nista signed up to see what they’re offer­ing dur­ing their “secret test mode” peri­od. Sign­ing up requires your cred­it card details up front, but they’re offer­ing free rides through to 21st Sep­tem­ber. At the moment, they appear to have four cars in Welling­ton, but expect that to grow. Once they start charg­ing, they’re cur­rent­ly talk­ing about a min­i­mum fare of $5, with ongo­ing charges of $0.50 per minute and $1.85 per km. I say “cur­rent­ly charg­ing”, since one aspect of their dynam­ic new mod­el is surge pric­ing, which rais­es the fares accord­ing to the laws of sup­ply and demand, some­times hit­ting users hard.

That’s not the only poten­tial fish hook in this shiny new ser­vice. As well as the praise from some parts of the busi­ness and tech world, there have been many seri­ous crit­i­cisms.

For a start, there’s the mat­ter of pas­sen­ger safe­ty with a busi­ness mod­el that side­steps the reg­u­la­tions of the taxi indus­try. New Zealand’s already light­ly reg­u­lat­ed taxi indus­try has prob­lems with shady dri­vers to start with, but there have been hor­ror sto­ries com­ing out of the US. Worse, the com­pa­ny tried to alle­vi­ate those con­cerns by offer­ing a “$1 Safe Ride Fee”: yes, pas­sen­gers had to actu­al­ly pay extra not to get assault­ed.

On top of that, Uber have fought against insur­ance and safe­ty leg­is­la­tion, been accused by their dri­vers of exploita­tion, and used what seem to be extreme­ly under­hand anti-com­pet­i­tive mea­sures. While we would­n’t sug­gest boy­cotting a com­pa­ny because of its CEO’s pol­i­tics, it would seem that Travis Kalan­ick makes Cameron Slater look like Laila Har­ré, and his lib­er­tar­i­an­ism man­i­fests itself in the com­pa­ny’s anti-union­ism and con­tempt for pub­lic safe­ty leg­is­la­tion. As any­one who remem­bers the Green Cabs Wars on the Welling­ton­ista will know, the Welling­ton taxi indus­try isn’t exact­ly a host of angels. But in a city that is already over­run with cabs, is there much need for an even less reg­u­lat­ed alter­na­tive?

We do hope that Uber will spur the local com­pa­nies into mak­ing bet­ter use of tech­nol­o­gy to improve their cus­tomers’ expe­ri­ence, and there are advan­tages in hav­ing elec­tron­ic records of every fare. It may be that in New Zealand, Uber won’t make the same ques­tion­able busi­ness moves that it has done in the US, and the inno­v­a­tive aspects of their ser­vice could actu­al­ly ben­e­fit Welling­to­ni­ans. We will watch with inter­est.