Sidecar

» see side.cr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

sidecar was a US rideshare app. it never reached turkey at any layer. the regulatory pattern that uber and lyft fought through in 2014-2015 was specifically a california problem in 2011, sidecar was the one that picked the fight first. by the time the model arrived in istanbul or ankara, the brand on the windshield said uber and the conversation about TNC laws was someone else's. i was in ankara doing computer vision research in 2011 and i knew sidecar only as a tech-press reference for "the company that invented rideshare before uber did".

the company launched out of san francisco in september 2011. sunil paul was the CEO and the holder of a 1999 patent on a "system and method for arranging transportation amongst parties through the use of mobile devices" which is as close to a paper trail for inventing rideshare as anyone has. jahan khanna was CTO and adrian fortino the third cofounder. they shipped before uberX existed. uber was still black-car only in 2011, the peer-to-peer model of pairing riders with everyday drivers in their personal cars was sidecar's design.

funding came in slowly. google ventures and lightspeed led a 10 million dollar series A in 2012. union square ventures and avalon ventures joined later, richard branson also took a stake. total raised over the company's life was around 39 million dollars. uber raised that much in a single round in 2013 and another billion the year after. the funding gap was the whole story.

the pivot to deliveries came in february 2015. sidecar announced a same-day local delivery service using the existing driver pool. by august most of the business was delivery, not rides. that was the move from a category sidecar had invented but lost into a smaller category that did not have the unit economics to support a venture-funded company. on december 29 2015 the operator announced the shutdown. on december 31 at 2pm pacific the apps stopped serving requests.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what sidecar invented first ~

the everyday-driver model was sidecar's contribution. before sidecar, every car-for-hire service used commercial drivers with commercial licenses. sidecar's app paired riders with people who happened to be in their own car heading the same way, which was technically illegal in most cities until the TNC (transportation network company) regulatory category got carved out for it. the california public utilities commission created the TNC framework in september 2013 specifically because sidecar and uberX had gone live with lyft right behind, all running in a gray zone the existing taxi rules could not contain.

sidecar also shipped a few features before uber or lyft did. fixed-price fares at booking time arrived on sidecar in 2014, a year before uber matched it. carpooling at a discount predated UberPool and lyft line by about two years. driver-side route choice, where the driver could see the destination before accepting, was a sidecar default that uber spent years refusing to implement. the technical product was ahead of the market for most of its life.

~ how the money decided it ~

uber's funding made the rest moot. by mid-2014 uber had raised over 1.5 billion dollars in single rounds, lyft had raised hundreds of millions. sidecar's 39 million total was less than what uber spent on driver incentives in a single quarter in a single market. when the rider subsidies got into double-digit dollars per ride, sidecar could not match without burning through the entire raise in weeks. the company narrowed to deliveries to survive on lower per-transaction take, that did not last either.

GM bought the assets and IP on january 19 2016, hired khanna and around twenty engineers. GM had invested 500 million dollars in lyft three weeks earlier and the sidecar buyout was a tuck-in to feed into that. the original sidecar app would not have run on a gm-built platform the same way. by the time anyone noticed the brand was gone, uber and lyft had a duopoly and TNCs as a regulated category were the normal way to call a car. sidecar built the category. the founders left with a small payout and the satisfaction of seeing the model they shipped become how cities moved.

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