Car-sharing to get away from the pandemic, according to Turo users
The car-sharing platform Turo surveyed its users and shared the results with Ars. …
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Have you started going for short drives to nowhere in particular, just for a change in scenery? If so, you’re not alone. According to new survey data from Turo, the peer-to-peer car-sharing platform, 39 percent of its users turned to the automobile just to get out of the house during the COVID-19 lockdown.
The coronavirus pandemic has been blamed for the perilous position in which traditional rental-car companies like Hertz have found themselves. But surprisingly for Turo, things haven’t been quite so bad. Or at least, they weren’t bad for very long.
“Before the pandemic hit, the company—in terms of bookings—was growing by about 50 percent year over year,” said Steve Webb, Turo’s VP of communications. By mid-March, as shelter-in-place orders were issued, things started to drop off to the point that, by early April, the business was looking at a 75-percent decline in year-on-year growth. But within a couple of weeks, that trend started to reverse. “As of last week, we are growing again YoY for the first time since 3/18. In March, we did not think the business would rebound this quickly,” Webb told Ars.
The company decided to survey users (guests in Turo-speak) to get a better idea of why they were renting cars, and it shared the results with Ars. In total, 1,249 users completed the survey, which asked questions like “how are you using cars during the COVID-19 pandemic” and “what motivated you to use Turo?” Some of the answers are probably what you’d expect, but others might be a little surprising. (Survey respondents
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