Peer-to-Peer Car Rentals 🚙

My weekend of travel included staying in a 4-bedroom mansion in the Hill Country of Texas, renting a pontoon boat (including engaging in a short boating tutorial from a bunch of teenage boys), and rental two 8-seater cars from two strangers who didn’t need their cars that weekend. Of course, the transactions in all of these cases were handled by intermediaries: VRBO for the housing, Liquid Thrillz for the boating, and, for the cars, Turo enabling the relatively seamless car lending experience in an increasingly dire car rental market.

     

Supply-and-demand = innovation

According to recent data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, car rental in June was 88% more expensive than in the previous year. To blame were supply shortcomings, caused by the global chip shortage’s impact on the manufacturing of new vehicles, paired with spiking demand for post-COVID vacationing.

The impact of skipping airport car rental lines might be here to stay. Funding and revenue from several private companies align with this consumer’s opinion. Turo, formerly known as RelayRides, has been offering up other people’s rides since 2009, at the outset of the “Airbnb of X” startup landscape. 

Another favorite among renters is Getaround, founded the same year. The company recently faced scrutiny with the D.C. Attorney General for operating without a license & apparently violating consumer protection laws after the theft of cars were listed on its site. The start-up paid $950K to settle with the AG and pay restitution to the vehicle owners.

Kyte soft-launched in 2020, nimbly seeking to meet the new challenges of pandemic renters wanting to flee the city and avoid the lines. They deal directly with car rental companies to deliver vehicles to a renter’s address, making the ease & affability of car rental companies a bit more digestible to the new consumer. The company raised a $9MM seed round in January.

Bikes are fair game as well. Spinlister enables vacation-destination locals to become their own bike rental entrepreneurs. Both Turo & Getaround market themselves as business opportunities for car owners, highlighting car listers who’ve scaled up to a 50 vehicle fleet, and prominently featuring the average earnings of a car lister as over $10k a month.