Anyone rent from Turo?

If you've never heard of it, Turo is a service that allows people to rent out their personal cars. The upside for car enthusiasts like us is the ability to try out interesting cars for the day. Lately, I've been renting whatever catches my eye and using it to drive around Houston on my property inspections. So far, I've rented an FR-S and a 2010 Shelby GT-500. The prices were very reasonable - $40 for the FR-S and $100 for the GT-500. Just make sure not to go over the mileage limit, that's where it can get expensive.

I wouldn't have an opportunity to try out these cars otherwise so I find it very appealing. Next on the list I think is an R32 GT-R, though it's a little pricey. Check out what's available in your area - filtering search by manual transmission - anything interesting? You west coasters are spoiled for choice - did a quick search in California and saw stuff like Alfa Romeo GTVs and BMW 2002s.

Sounds interesting. GetAround is I think the local one here. I just don't understand the upside when owning even a newish sub-compact. Parking bumps etc. go up exponentially and the user then has to park your car legally and I'd assume close to where they picked it up which might not be that close to your home considering city parking (unless you can afford off-street parking).

Huh, interesting. I've alway thought this sort of a business model would make a lot of sense for things like pickup trucks - lots of people keep an extra truck around with a very low useage rate. Although i guess the downside there is most truck chores probably run a significantly higher risk of damage or undue wear on the vehicle.

It's really pretty cool. The pickup/dropoff is all coordinated through the app, which also provides a good rating platform and insurance covering the cost of the vehicle in the event of a mishap.

Back from the dead. I started thinking about this again after watching another Doug Demuro youtube vid. There's almost nothing interesting for rent in San Antonio. Hard to assess how much of an interesting car's payment could be subsidized. I figure a fairly cheap car at a cheap rate would be rented pretty often, though. I don't tend to buy boring normal stuff that normal people would be interested in, but.. i'm thinking about it now.

Potential to subsidize a new (er) vehicle payment yes. But what about people with less than good intentions renting it? As the saying goes you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, I don't see how you could easily weed out people with ill intentions before renting to them. I'm old enough to remember when the slogan "drive it like a rental" was somewhat prevalent at least in my area. Youtube some videos of people doing things like installing nitrous kits on rentals for weekend trips to the drag strip or worse yet street racing. I don't have the faith in humanity that others have.

It could be interesting to combine with something like buying a non salvage title car for cheap off like copart or something. Where the cars actual value was higher than you paid so if something did happen to it maybe you came out ahead or the car got to the cash positive point sooner.

I would think that the biggest issue is discover-ability no one knows about Turo etc.

Either expensive type cars people normally cannot rent or the types of vehicles rental companies charge too much for but people need occasionally like trucks or minivans or large suvs maybe?

Yeah the most rented one locally is a 31 dollar a day 1997 F150 standard cab long bed with 103 trips. So assuming those were 1 day rentals he's made 3k toward that truck

Next most popular is a scion xb 36 trips, a 2004 miata 32 trips, and a Tesla Model S with 25 trips but it costs 118 dollars a day, so that dude is definitely not covering his payments with renting it out. (unless he rents for long periods)

You could easily make your money back by having a fleet of old cheap pickups and vans as well as maybe a few cheap functional small cars (xB, Focus Wagon, Vibe, Saturn LW)