Anyone ever use Turo?
 

Thinking about trying it out for an upcoming trip, but didn't know if anyone here had any experiences with it? I'm old so new things scare and confuse me.

Used once during my stay in Vegas. More important to know who you book from rather than using the app itself.
Most of the cars in major markets are owned by rental companies.

A friend used it last year when they came to visit. The car had a cracked windshield and an expired temp plate. No way you're getting out of a ticket driving that thing with an out of state license.
Check the user reviews carefully when making your decision.

I've used it a few times. Definitely rent from someone with a great rating and many reviews. Check to see if they have multiple cars too, usually means they at least have somewhat of an idea of what they're doing. I've never had any issues.

Greatest app ever. I was in Hawaii and could not get a rental for the life of me. Rentals were $300 plus a day. I quickly downloaded Turo and rented a Tesla for $100 a day. Saved my vacation. Highly recommended

This was going to be my plan, seen a few telsas for around $100 a day; would be in the south bay area and taking a trip out to wine country -- beats paying over $150 a night for a smartcar from a rental place.

How do the logistics work? you just uber to their house? My trip is booked so now I'm trying to figure out this portion.

That or some offer airport pickup for a fee or some at no charge.

I booked a Tesla 3 AWD long range and was able to discuss all the logistics with the guy. Looks like a lot of people charge like $20-50 for pickups. I found one close to the hotel we are first staying at, and also on the way back to the airport from the second hotel so should work out well.

How does charging a Tesla work with Turo? Is it free at the Tesla stations? Or do you have to pay?

Apparently the Tesla chargers recognize the car when it plugs in, and automatically charge the owner’s account - there’s no ability to “pay at the pump.” Maybe at some other charging system that’s compatible.
When my cousin got a Model 3, the dealership in NJ screwed up the info for initial setup, so the chargers wouldn’t recognize their car on the way home to Maine. Fortunately (I guess) that’s a common problem, so the 24-hr hotline was able to get them fixed without too much of a wait.

You can use a Supercharger (bills owner of the car like xturner mentioned) and the owner will send you an invoice after the fact. Some owners will let you pay like $25 to return it at whatever level. It really seems to be case-by-case by the owner on those levels of "add-ons". For example, not every owner is willing to pick you up from a location, and if they do there's a charge. Or some don't offer unlimited mileage, etc.

There's not a ton of info on Turo for these sorts of questions. I had to book the car, then chat with the owner to clear a few things like that up.

Im going to be paying ~$500 for a Tesla for 4 days. I'll just have to charge it once on return which will cost roughly $10-15 depending. That's not bad.

The next best choice for a regular (not complete shite) car was a honda accord nearby, and the rental would have been $365. Factoring in ill probably put about 250 miles on the car, and that's about 10 gallons of fuel give or take and gas is like $5.75 for regular, that's another ~$60. So it's not too much more to rent the Tesla, plus it'll just be fun to get in one and try it out.

I couldnt even secure a regular rental with Entreprise for my trip. Hertz cheapest was POS car was even more expensive:

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...591d3c3c4f.png

and it's roughly the same cost as Budget:

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...83551a75ba.png


I'd rather be grabbing an Uber out of SFO instead of of waiting in line for 2-3 hours trying to secure car, so I'm excited to try this service out.

Had a terrible experience with a Turo Tesla, but it ended ok. Rented one in Milwaukee for a trip to RA. Took pics of the bald ass tires when we picked it’ll up and had a great trip to our airbnb. Next day however, four of us were riding back from dinner when the tire blew in BFE Wisconsin. With no cell reception and full insurance, we set off to find a bar of LTE, $5000 later in tire carcass damage, a missing rear bumper, and 1000 mosquito bites, we abandoned it for the tow truck drive to find and hitched a ride with friends. Turo briefly pushed back, but eventually gave my friend a full refund.

wow.

Tried to rent it once, app seems pretty easy to order, and a lot of options, didn't going in further the that. But one of my friends run rental business of his cars on there and seems legit.

Since this thread just got bumped anyways, @Braineack how was your Turo Tesla trip?

Trip itself was great. Tesla I'm not sold.

I had major "charging" anxiety the entire trip. Out in Napa Valley there weren't that many chargers, only one real bank of superchargers. I'm used to an abundance of free chargers in every parking lot out my way.

The car was very over-optimistic about it's mileage range. I had the 405mi extended range model stuck in Turo mode. But I ate through charge like I'm eating cake. I dont quite remember the exact mileage, but I made about a 75mi drive out there from SF and it ate about double that in charge. Granted it was +100°F so I was running the a/c heavily since the car is a glorified greenhouse... but still.

When I finally did have to charge it, everyone -- including the owner -- swore to me it would be like 15-20mi to charge it up. It took an hour. We were too happy about that one. luckily it was in an outlet mall and we just went shopping while it charged.

The software is buggy as hell, and controls are retarded and not intuitive at all. Everything requires you to take your eyes off the road and fiddle around in the ipad.

I don't quite understand the constant need for a poorly rendered 3D scene to stay up on your ipad screen. again, it's a distraction that you keep watching -- I don't need to see what the computer sees. and that shit is so glitchy and jumpy and completely wrong half the time, they should be too embarrassed to display it.

The self-driving feature is kinda neat, but it would straight up slam on the brakes if you came up to a green light using it -- taking you from like 60mph to 40mph to drive through it, almost causing an accident the first time it happened to me. It'll also just kick out of self-driving mode whenever it pleases and jerk the wheel and do other stupid shit.

I don't think I saved any money renting one, with the cost of filling the battery and having to fill it twice for such a short trip, plus the added cost of the rental.

We did very much, however, enjoy being able to turn on the a/c in the car when we knew we were going to go out driving soon, on a 105°F day to have your car cool down to a comfortable temp before you get in was a pretty sweet feature.

Car is comfortable enough, but I'll probably resist buying something like that as long as I possibly can.



https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...fc927041f9.png
in typical SF fashion, the car pickup was delayed cause crime. We were supposed to do a day in the city but went to Napa early because every single person warned us to be careful if going into the city and decided that Pelosi doesn't deserve my extra tourist $.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...24b00ea9fd.png
Buzz kill.

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Lonely lunch while I waited for my wife to finish her business trip.

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...582805ab1c.png
view from Claremont Club -- hotel we stayed in Oakland.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...ed824ff846.png
Lunch.

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...8f19ead8bb.png
Breakfast.

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...21c662099a.png
Thomas Keller lunch.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...41656e7168.png
Sweet Treat.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...4dd516b7ad.png
Artesa is my favorite winery. Third time going there now, but as a wine club member, I ended up cancelling it after this visit. I wasn't treated like a member -- i had a booking there for 3 months and was told there was no seating in that outdoor area when i arrived and had to opt for the plebe tasting room cause i didnt want to wait.

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...4b3431d470.png
lunchy drinks at Botegga.

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...2c71f6ff6c.png
Lunch cheese at Bistro Jeanty

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...1fc47a689f.png
Look ma no hands.



also:

Interesting feedback compared to my real world experience as an owner of a 2018 Tesla M3 Performance.

Charging anxiety:
we don't really have much for superchargers here in Wisconsin yet, so if anyone should feel this pain, it should be me. There are all of maybe 3 that are in a reasonable driving range from my house, but we predominantly use our 110v garage outlet for charging most of the time. While it charges slow (because 10A is all I can use in that specific outlet), it does the job for 90% of our use cases with the car (which is <50mi/day commuting). If we do go on longer trips with it, the supercharger locations that we have are in pretty convenient locations overall. If we are doing ~200mi round trip from home, we just have to make sure the car is full when we leave by thinking ahead and there's no stopping ever required.

Range Estimation:
I've found that the range estimation by your battery icon to be overly optimistic, but if you jump into the battery efficiency/usage display, it is much more accurate. I have no idea why there's a discrepancy between the two. At the end of the day, our car has a 85kWh battery pack and uses on average 330Wh/mi during the summer with the A/C on. This usage varies a lot in the cold winter months depending on outside temp and the speed you are traveling, but we see around 400-500Wh/mi if I had to throw a dart at a wall and give you a number. The basic math tells you then that my summer range is 85000/330 = 257mi and winter is around 85000/450 = 189mi.

Charge Time:
What chargers were you using? Tesla superchargers or other generic 240v options?

A key thing to note, charging to 100% should only be done if you really need to. It's not an efficient use of time if you are expecting/needing to charge to 100% every time. You do have to change your mindset a bit when planning trips with these. To be short and sweet, the charge rate is a function of the battery's state of charge (SOC). At lower SOC (say 0-70%), the charge rate is very fast. That charge rate starts dropping further and further the closer your SOC gets to 100%. We end up finding that going from 10% to 75% charge takes us into that 10-15min zone. Going from 75% to 100% could take another 20-25 mins over that (this is assuming you are using a high current Tesla supercharger, expect these rates/times to be worse on lower current alternate options). If you don't need to charge to 100% because your next destination has another charger (or you will end up at home), simply save yourself the time and charge to what you need.. Again, its a mindset shift..

Real World Experience For Me:
We took our M3 from Milwaukee to Tail of the Dragon and back for MATG in August. It is about a 1500mi round trip to do. In short summary, on average, we found that with driving at 80mph with AC on, we were stopping every ~2hrs (180mi) for 15-20mins, then back on the road. While not ideal if you are looking to cannonball a run somewhere, it was honestly a nice change of pace to stop, stretch your legs, grab a drink/snack, run to the bathroom, then hop back in for the next 2hrs. The whole 1500mi trip cost us $112 in electric costs. In comparison, the same exact mileage cost us about $250 in my kmiata thanks to $4/gal gas and garbage hwy fuel economy of a miata.

Real World Experience For My Wife:
She was approaching stop and go traffic in auto-steer mode. Car kept a safe distance between her and the car in front of her. Long story short, a distracted driver 3 cars behind her didn't hit the brakes at all and rear ended the car in front of them which caused a chain reaction pile up approaching my wife. She didn't have time to react, but the Tesla noticed this occurring behind it and intervened. The tesla accelerated enough on its own to fill in the "safety gap" it had given itself and therefore avoided getting rear ended. Obviously, there's limitations to what the car can save you from, but this was awesome as an owner to have the car save itself from what would have been a fender bender in any other make/model

Takeaway:
I'm not a person to push the Tesla ownership onto anyone. No car is perfect for everything. The full self driving we rarely use as it is glitchy. I still can't go without my 14mpg gas guzzling Chevy pickup for a variety of use utilitarian use cases. I can't ever imagine replacing my kmiata with a Tesla for track duties for many reasons. The Tesla is, however, extremely good at what it does if you have the budget to afford one intially, want a cheap per mi vehicle to drive, and have capability to charge at your house (even if its slow rate like I am doing). I haven't used a supercharger with the Tesla since mid-September. My home electric bill has gone up about $40/mo with charging only at home. My wife is saving $5k/year on fuel costs alone compared to her 2015 Explorer that it replaced (assuming 12k/year mileage). The other ICE vehicle we compared the Tesla to prior to buying was a new Mazda CX-30, and we found that total monthly cost of ownership (maintenance, payment, fuel/electric, insurance) was within $50 for either option with the same 12k/year mileage, so we took the plunge into the EV space (knowing we have other ICE vehicles available to use as needed) and so far we have absolutely no regrets. I wouldn't be able to justify owning it as an only vehicle, but it's been a great second vehicle. To add icing to the cake, it's a mid-11 second car.. not exactly boring to drive when you wanna go have fun. That was the real sell point over what would've been a super boring CX-30

I was a one time renter. If I commuted to work, I'd have no issues. We have chargers all over the damn place here -- free -- in almost every parking lot, including my own office.

My 911 is currently barely making 13mpg in this cold weather. I'm okay.

Those sounds like generic 240v charging stations if they truly are that prevalent. Nice to have for sure, but still not exactly superchargers if you are looking for a fast charge.

there's both. but correct.

My whole thing was I thought I could get free charging the week i had it, here and there, and I wasn't able to due major lack of infrastructure. Even the hotel I stayed at only had two slow chargers and were ones I had to sign up for and pay.

Rented a Model 3 DMLR from Turo for 3 days, sold me on car, bought one. Installed charger at home and life was good. Phantom braking is real and sucks, only trust autopilot in bumper to bumper traffic.

Brain, I’m looking at 991.1 4S, daily driver. What do you have? Thoughts as a DD?

Edit: Sold Model 3 in April for what I paid 1.5 years and 30k miles later lol, thanks Elon and inflation.

I wanted a 996 Turbo, but ended up with a 997 C4S 6-sp DD. Love it, everything just feels great and raw in it. steering feel, connection to the road, mass tractions.

I thought about a 991.1 base, but really wanted AWD in this area since I am DDing it.

I was driving a Tacoma dual cab there for a while, and every time I got in my CX5 I was like oh this thing is so small and peppy. Now I get in the CX5 and im like this thing is huge and slow and awful...

the community really sucks, the just know how to take things to dealer and pay for shit. there are some gems out there, but most just know how to write checks.


snow shoes equipped:

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...0e9b6234a9.png

Same scenario here, will DD in UP of MI, so looking for C4. Is it point and shoot like a Miata in snow? I was thinking 991.1 so I get the aluminum body for rust protection. Either this or a real Integra Type R. Either one I plan to drive into the ground.

Thoughts on market dip? 6 month for big discounts?

I bought at the peak of the market, so dont ask me. ROFL. but its come down a lot since Jan and probably will continue to. but you're paying a tax with a manual and/or S and/or 4. I was smart and paid all three taxes!

watch rennlist listings for the best deals. bringatrailor is another tax.

I joined 996 and 997 facebook groups for info and listings and found a pretty decent deal.


the handling is hard to describe, but my stock ass suspension is better than anything else ive ever felt. the weight in the rear is a weird feeling but it just goes where you want it to. I really want to get the DSC controller to improve/tune my shocks and have sport mode be useable. current sport just makes the shocks full stiff and the shit just bounces all over -- people say the DSC controller completely changes how well the car drives.

speaking of optimistic mileage...

https://www.ktvu.com/news/tesla-fine...3YJ-3HMGyPj8Rk

Not surprised in seeing someone get lawsuit happy over that topic.. the range questions are probably the most common ones I get from people up here in the cold north.. I think the article is a little extreme is stating a 50% range drop, because (while possible), I think that use case is extremely isolated and the owners in those environments are well aware of the battery limitations in that temp (just like there are ICE limitations in that temp). In the big cold snap we recently had, I saw about a 30-35% range drop overall during typical driving scenarios. A friend of mine reported a circumstance where he was in bumper to bumper traffic in -15F air temps where energy usage on a per/mi basis was over twice as high as his normal average for that period of time, but guess what? all the ICE vehicles were also in the same circumstance of burning more fuel than what they were rated for per/mi too... so I can't necessarily get behind all the stones being thrown at Tesla here.

If you are in a pinch looking for range in the winter, turn the heater off and run the seat heaters, did it in Dec 2020 heading from Green Bay to Marquette, was stuck in Marquette though for 12hrs on a 5amp charger lol

side note: If you break from 150 ish to 30 on the street, hard, you will log multiple brake overheat warnings :)

Friend of mine took a Model S Plaid to Blackhawk Farms and the brakes lasted a little over one complete hot lap... not exactly Tesla's strong suit

Cobalt makes race compounds for Tesla, fyi.

My work installs a lot of MCS on teslas, just to make them handle not like a truck. Couple that with the cobalt pads and an alignment, the locals enjoy track days with a supercharge across the street after every session.

Thanks for sharing Scott. Fun read.

I'm no EV hater but I'm hesitant to make the jump even for a daily. I look in my junk drawer at the pile of old electronics that are no longer useful due to their batteries no longer holding a charge, or super outdated hardware/software, etc. and see electric cars going the same way. If I were to get one it wouldn't be a car I'd plan on keeping for life. And I try to avoid the buy new cars and trade them in every few years dance that many people like to play.

My boss has a m3p and it rips. So no doubting their performance in that regard.

I think 99% of performance guys would love that setup on a M3 DM LR with boost mode. Boost mode is dead even with a Trachhawk, 60-140. Tesla had 2 passengers and was on about 70% charge in Mexico. Handling was exactly how you describe, truck like with ghost feeling rear. Regen brakes are badass, one peddle driving is awkward at first but superior under normal conditions.

You buy one of these as a super commuter and dump them in a sweet spot of value. Not a collector car “GT350” that you would consider keeping long term. You buy them to be grey man fast, at least in Texas. Cops don’t even blink.

I called that shit right away...

https://electrek.co/2023/07/27/tesla...report-states/

I’ve definitely heard the horror stories but I chalk that up to negativity bias. People are less likely to share their positive or uneventful experience unless prompted. I’ve rented 3-4 times from Turo and have had nothing but good and uneventful experiences. As long as you protect yourself by taking pictures and documenting everything when you pickup, you should be fine.