Not sure what we all think about the sharing economy. In the old days, all that meant was giving a mate a lift somewhere. The upside was that they either bought you a pint of Watney’s Red Barrel or chipped in some money for petrol. Well, here is a modern-day, app-based equivalent and it is called Turo.
The point is that some of us have more than one motor tucked up in our garages and it is, of course, impossible to drive them all at once. So why not let someone else borrow them, for a fee? They describe it as Airbnb but with motors and inevitably it all started in the US. I struggle with the concept of someone who isn’t me driving my cars. Especially one I’ve owned for 39 years. So I needed to have a reassuring chat with Turo’s UK director, Xavier Collins.
“We want to put a billion cars on the planet to better use and there are 31.3 million in the UK alone,” he said. “Essentially, we are disrupting car hire and trying to make the experience better from the owner’s and customer’s perspective.”
Car hire is often a fairly rubbish experience and I can’t think of anything better than driving something interesting. The average trip on Turo earns an owner £130, with 75% of the trip’s cost paid direct to the car owner within five days. If an owner rented their car just five days a month, they would earn about £7800 a year – enough to cover typical repayments, road tax and insurance. Personally, I would see that as an opportunity to buy a 2011 Volvo C70 2.0 D3 SE with 70k miles. I’ve always liked the look of those and you can use them all year round.
