Transportation
A Taxi Service Where Payment Is Optional
Sidecar hopes to compete with Uber by using part-time drivers and letting riders decide what to pay. Will it work?
And accepting a ride with someone you don’t know might make some people uneasy. "My only concern with SideCar," says Levis, "is just the sheer fact that you’re getting into someone’s car that you don’t know, which could be a little unnerving. But the truth of the matter is I’ve never had a bad experience."
SideCar has more than 500 drivers in the Bay Area and has organized thousands of rides in San Francisco and Seattle, where it launched last November. All this success has started to cut into Uber’s profits. So much so that Uber recently announced plans to unveil a ridesharing service of its own in California.