There’s nothing fun about renting a car the old-fashioned way. It’s expensive, and it probably means you’re taking an unnecessary trip to the airport. Turo, a peer-to-peer car sharing service that launched in Boston in 2010, seems like an attractive alternative: A car-owner posts their car for anyone to rent, with (relatively) cheap listings compared to traditional rental service prices, and rentable vehicles available for contactless pickup across the city. <\/p>\n
But if you’re a New York resident, in my totally biased opinion, Turo sucks ass and should be avoided at all costs.<\/p>\n
My (admittedly one-sided) feud with Turo began this summer, for reasons that Turo itself declined to explain to me when I requested comment for this article.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was one of the first blistering June afternoons of the year, when I was supposed to be on my way to New Jersey in a stranger’s 2017 Cadillac XT5. I’d booked the car weeks earlier via Turo, after a positive experience on the app back in April. The price was right; the trunk was roomy enough for camping gear; my friends and I were ready to hit the road.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But when it came time to pick up the rental car, I found that it wasn’t at its appointed spot: a side street in Bushwick, in front of an art gallery. I immediately called Turo customer service, and was pleasantly surprised when I was able to get a human being on the line. Maybe it was going to be OK!<\/p>\n
Turo’s customer service representative walked me through canceling my initial booking, and helped me rebook a new vehicle with a partial credit towards my next rental. It wasn’t perfect, but I was desperate\u2014heading to a music festival that started that evening, with four other friends relying on this car for transportation. We were ready to take a couple-hundred-dollar-L in order to beat traffic. Then, just as I went to rebook my rental, I received a notification: I was no longer eligible to rent a car through Turo in New York state.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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