“As we continue to grow and invest in our brand more and more people are sharing their vehicles,” says Turo CEO Andre Haddad. “With our app, you can actually share your car so that you can earn money when you’re not using your car. Last year we ended the year with more than 400,000 vehicles listed and our community is now more than 10 million strong. We’re growing really rapidly. We’re hoping to be in the next few years in the same realm as ride-sharing and home-sharing.”
Andre Haddad, CEO of Turo, discusses the $250 million in new funding from IAC, the tremendous growth of their car-sharing app, as well as fights with Enterprise Rent-A-Car which has been trying to stop them in their tracks in an interview on CNBC:
We’re Hoping To Be In The Same Realm As Ride-Sharing
Turo is a great business. There are almost one-and-a-half billion cars around the world and they are idle the vast majority of the time. With our app, you can actually share your car so that you can earn money when you’re not using your car. In the last few months, we’ve seen people earning more than $500 a month sharing their car a few days a month. It’s a great opportunity for car owners to share their cars and earn money with them when they’re not using them.
We focus a lot on building trust and safety. We have a great partner with Liberty Mutual to cover all the insurance for both the car owner that is sharing their cars with their guests as well as providing coverage for guests that are driving these cars. It’s all about bringing that new idea to market and building trust and building safety for our community. As we continue to grow and invest in our brand more and more people are sharing their vehicles. Last year we ended the year with more than 400,000 vehicles listed and our community is now more than 10 million strong. We’re growing really rapidly. We’re hoping to be in the next few years in the same realm as ride-sharing and home-sharing.
We’re Very Excited To Partner With IAC
We’re very excited to partner with IAC. IAC is an incredible company that has a lot of expertise in the world of marketplaces. We’re looking forward to collaborating with Joey Levin and the team at IAC to help accelerate our progress and help accelerate our growth. We obviously want to invest more in our expansion. We want to refine our customer experience and we’d like to expand into more markets. Those are the key priorities for us in the next few years.
Over the last few months, we’ve seen that the average host is sharing their vehicle roughly a third of the time, about ten days a month. With that ten days a month they’re earning roughly $550 of earnings on a monthly basis. As you can imagine with $550 of earnings you can pay for your car payment. It’s an incredible deal for a lot of people who are using the app. Traditional ownership implies utilization that’s less than 10 percent of the time. It’s a very inefficient use of an asset that depreciates really rapidly and has a lot of fixed costs. Turo is a tremendous opportunity for people who want to make better use of their asset.
Enterprise Is Trying To Avoid Competition So We’re Fighting Back
We are faced with a lot of challenges on the regulatory front. Really it’s driven by the traditional rental car industry and by Enterprise in particular. I think the traditional car rental players are concerned that consumers now have a bit more choice. They are concerned that we have probably a better selection, better value, and better convenience as an alternative to the traditional options of car rental. We’ve definitely been battling Enterprise this year. There are 37 states in the United States alone where we have gone into government relation battles with Enterprise. They’re trying to pass laws that will restrict the ability for consumers to share their cars. They’re trying to avoid competition so we’re fighting back.
We’ve been building a strong coalition of like-minded people. We have great support from the car manufacturing industry and from the insurance industry. We have prevailed in all of these regulatory battles this year. We have prevailed in 25 state regulatory battles last year as well. We’re trying to be very vigilant when it comes to protecting the ability for consumers to share their cars and we’re going to continue to fight these battles.