Uber, 1455 Market Street in San Francisco. (Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM)

The successor company to defunct ride-hailing app Sidecar sued Uber Technologies Inc. on Tuesday alleging Uber used unfair tactics to drive competition off the road and is “now a monopolist.”

The suit filed by SC Innovations Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California claims Uber stole Sidecar's business model and “intentionally sustained near-term losses that were designed to drive Sidecar out of the market while Uber acquired a dominant market position.”

In a statement, Uber denied the allegations and said Sidecar's suit got ”it backwards” when it called the company's low prices anticompetitive.

“Ridesharing is a highly competitive industry, with many players coming and going over the years—like Sidecar, not all have survived,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement.

Ethan Glass and Claude Stern of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan are representing SC Innovations.

“We fought hard in the marketplace, and were the first company to introduce a number of cutting-edge features that are now a part of every ride-hailing app,” Sidecar founder Sunil Paul said in a blog post Tuesday. “If Uber had won the ride-hailing market on a level playing field, we would have been disappointed, but that's something we could have lived with. That's not what happened.”

Sidecar launched its ridesharing app in 2012, three years after Uber's debut in 2009. But Sidecar allowed drivers to use their personal vehicles and pick up passengers traveling similar routes in one ride. Uber launched a similar service, Uber X, in 2013.

Sidecar alleges Uber subsidized driver pay and rider fare, operating at a loss, as executives “specifically planned for this subsidized pricing strategy to foreclose competition.”

“In plain English, it means Uber subsidized rides and driver payments to drive Sidecar and competitors out of the market, so they could raise prices later,” Paul said. “And it looks like their plan worked. We shut down in December 2015 and ever since Uber has been raising prices for passengers and lowering payments to drivers.”

It's not the first time Uber's been sued by the competition or litigated against Quinn Emanuel attorneys. In February, Uber settled a high-profile trade secrets case brought by Google's autonomous vehicle branch Waymo, which claimed Uber poached a star engineer for his access to Google's self-driving vehicle technology. Waymo was represented by a Quinn team in that litigation.

The latest suit comes at a busy time for Uber. Less than a week ago, the company filed to go public—around the time that competitor Lyft, Inc. did the same.

“We believe the timing of this complaint, filed three years after Sidecar went out of business, is not a coincidence,” Uber's spokesperson said.

 Read the complaint:

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