Shared mobility is growing in popularity, with classic fleet companies like Hertz and Europcar being challenged by newcomers like Go Get and Uber Carshare (formerly Car Next Door), but you might be less familiar with Turo, a “car-sharing marketplace” that treats vehicle booking more like Airbnb.
Turo has been operating for years overseas, but it only set up shop in Australia in November. Unlike the other shared mobility companies listed above, Turo’s vehicles are all owned by “hosts”. As touched on already, it’s a similar business structure to Uber or Airbnb, where the company doesn’t own the cars or employ drivers as anything more than independent contractors, while the business focuses on supporting the platform with customer service, apps and booking systems (all while taking a cut).
It’s Turo’s mission to “put the world’s one-and-a-half, now closer to two-billion, cars to better use,” Turo’s managing director for Australia Tim Rossanis told Gizmodo Australia.
And one of the unique ways that Turo reckons it can fit into the car-sharing marketplace is with electric vehicles – to help customers make decisions before making a purchase.
‘Try before you buy’
Buying an EV can be daunting. Let alone the fact that technology could be entirely new to you, with concerns like range anxiety, charger reliability and servicing costs often coming up, supply constraints and limited test driving opportunities could also be holding people back.
While Tesla and Polestar are fairly accommodating for test drives, these opportunities typically only last for a short duration, giving you an idea of the vehicle and how it drives, but not an idea of how it can work into your life.
“We think [Turo is] an amazing platform for individuals to try an EV before they decide to make that long-term decision to buying one,” Rossanis said.
It’s exactly the kind of thing Rossanis thinks Turo can help with. You don’t get to experience what it’s like to own one of these vehicles with a standard test drive, but with a shared EV, you get a better idea.
“It’s like, you get 10-15 minutes, you drive around the block, and you don’t really get the experience of owning the car,” Rossanis said.
“If you want to try an EV, you can book one on Turo longer than obviously just half an hour. The average duration of a trip on Turo is, if we’re talking in the days, multiple days.”
This way, as Rossanis said, you can get a feel for the vehicle across multiple days, see how it goes with charging, how it might work in your living circumstance, deeply familiarise yourself with the operating system and, obviously, see which specific model might work for you.
Obviously, Rossanis is saying this with the lens of getting more customers to the Turo platform, but his comments make complete sense.
“People do have anxiety about moving from petrol and diesel vehicles that we’ve been using for years, if not decades, to this new form of transportation,” he added.
“It’s really not that different. The charging is improving, it’s improving a lot. The range is as good as the range in a petrol car now with many of the options, on the market.”
What electric vehicles are available on Turo?
Unsurprisingly, the Tesla Model 3 and the Tesla Model Y rank among the most popular cars available on Turo to share, electric or not. While electric vehicles make up eight per cent of the entire Turo marketplace internationally, Rossanis told Gizmodo Australia that electric vehicle borrowing in Australia is “significantly higher than that”.
If you’re wondering, a cursory glance at Turo at the time of writing has Model 3 bookings listed at between $431 and $1,361 in Sydney – don’t be confused by those prices, as they cover multiple days with the car. Turo claims that BYDs, Porsche Taycans and Hyundai Ioniqs are also available to try out, but the only non-Tesla I can see available in Sydney appears to be an electric Mini Cooper SE Yours.
Throughout my chat with Rossanis, I was hesitant to appear that I was promoting his company, but I can’t look past the fact it makes complete sense to use a platform like Turo if you’re thinking about how an electric vehicle could work into your day-to-day life, without making the very expensive commitment first.