Hail and Farewell, Sidecar. It Was a Good Ride

The company will stop offering all rides and deliveries on December 31, 2015 at 2 p.m. PT. Sidecar founder and CEO Sunil Paul announced the decision in a Medium post on Tuesday.

San Francisco-based Sidecar was launched in 2012 and backed by Google Ventures and British billionaire Richard Branson, but failed to gain traction against its larger rivals.

Sidecar is survived by Uber, the behemoth in the ride sharing industry, as well as smaller competitors like Lyft and newcomers Gett and Via.

Unlike its competitors, Sidecar did not aggressively seek a high valuation, but that left it with less cash to grow.

Paul didn’t specify what that thing is, beyond noting “it’s by no means the end of the journey for the company”. Now, though, Sidecar faces Uber on that turf too, with the company launching a second app, Uber Rush, to go alongside its core minicab business.

The council passed an ordinance earlier this month creating new requirements for Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), including a phased in approach to incorporate fingerprint background checks.

Lyft has raised $1.3 billion and Uber has raised $7.4 billion, with another $1 billion round in the works. “Even when it pivoted to transporting goods, it still had to compete with Postmates, and even Uber is transporting goods”.

After much debate and delay, Uber is up and running in Birmingham.

“Our vision is to reinvent transportation and we’ve achieved that with ridesharing and deliveries”, the co-founders said in their goodbye note on Medium. Since Sidecar was struggling to gain passengers, it tried to retool in August by focusing on business-to-business deliveries of food and products over giving rides.

Only time will tell what Paul and his partners will think of next, and if this time their originality will also be supported by more successful marketing strategies.