The Turo App Offers Luxury Car Rental At A Lower Cost | British GQ

Political satirist PJ O’Rourke once wrote that no car behaves better than a rental car. We do not recommend that you follow all (or really all) advice from his provocative and tongue-in-cheek essay, “How to Drive Fast with Drugs While Squeezing Your Wing-Wang and Without Spilling Your Drink,” but you’ll understand where it came from. Driving a rental car offers a unique feeling of freedom that you just don’t get by driving a car you own.

We wonder then what O’Rourke would think of Turo, a luxury car rental app that gives you access to classic all-electric Rolls-Royce, McLaren and Tesla, as well as your usual mid-size Fords and Fiat. The app, a Boston Massachusetts start-up that launched in the US in 2009, connects people who have nice cars with those who want to borrow them and it launched in the UK over Christmas. Very kindly, the company offered us a credit to test it.

Starting the app is a magical experience, similar to a real garage version of your best Grand Theft Auto save game, limited only by your wallet size. At the time of writing, you can borrow a Tesla Model S, Jaguar F-Type, Porsche Panamera, ’70s Rolls Royce Shadow, or Mercedes Benz S-Class, all available in the app, with a few taps of thumb. It really is that easy. No waiting in a smelly airport terminal for a bored employee to try and sell you extra insurance – even this is all handled for you, in the app.

Reality strikes when you reserve a car. Since this is a peer-to-peer service like AirBnb, you won’t get as good a service as the company you choose to rent it from. Turo is only an intermediary.