GM Purchases Sidecar Ride-Sharing Company After Lyft Investment

On the back of investing $500 million into ride-sharing app Lyft, General Motors has just acquired the majority of Sidecar Technologies, another ride-hailing firm.

Based on San Francisco, Sidecar was actually one of the original peer-to-peer car sharing programs after it launched in 2012. Uber didn’t launch its ride-sharing service until 2013 but compared to Lyft and Uber, Sidecar hasn’t been successful in raising enough in investments to remain competitive in this ever-increasingly popular market.

As a matter of fact, it was confirmed by co-founder and chief executive officer in late December that Sidecar would shut down. In this announcement, Sunil Paul said “This is the end of the road for the Sidecar ride and delivery service, but it’s by no means the end of the journey for the company.”

As part of GM’s purchase of Sidecar, the American automaker is said to have bought most of the assets and all of the technology of the firrn. It will also bring on board 20 employees from Sidecar, most likely to help with the development of GM’s own ride-sharing service (alongside its car-sharing program), to compete with Ford’s impending entrance into the market.

It isn’t known how much GM paid but it’s speculated to be less than $40 million.

Note: GM’s car-sharing program pictured.