by Tim Rossanis
posted on September 5, 2024
Vice President of Turo Australia, Tim Rossanis, reflects on the state of car sharing in Australia and shares why he thinks the industry is poised to thrive.
There’s been a lot of talk lately of the state of the car sharing industry in Australia. As the leader of Turo Australia, and having spent 13 years of my career in the mobility and travel sector, I feel confident that car sharing is not just here to stay in Australia, but is poised to thrive.
Today marks an exciting milestone in that journey, as we announce our global partnership with Uber, which will see Turo vehicles available to book via Uber Rent once the integration has been completed.
Since launching in late 2022, we’ve been delivering on our goals to bring the magic of Turo Down Under. Our Australian business is the fastest growing market for Turo globally — with revenue growth of +171% YoY in H1 of 2024 — and we believe our strategy, based on insights gleaned from over a decade of building this quite complex business in the US, is the right approach for car sharing in Australia and beyond.
How we’ve succeeded
We learned early on in the US that the hourly, local mobility-focused model wasn’t for us. It led to high-risk, low-cost trips, and the economics just didn’t work. So we pivoted. We changed our minimum trip length to one day and shifted our focus to travel, road trips, longer term vehicle replacement, and the many other use cases that align more with lower-risk, longer duration, more profitable trips. And with this pivot towards a more travel-focused segment, versus the short-duration utility segment, we’ve considered our primary competitors to be the big rental car companies — those goliath incumbents with a real stronghold on the market.
In Australia, we’ve been able to stand on the shoulders of Turo’s trial and error in the US, Canada, and beyond, leveraging those learnings to turbocharge the business in Australia.
- We’ve developed proprietary algorithms to help us mitigate risk and fraud on our platform, helping protect both hosts and Turo from bad actors.
- We’ve pioneered protection offerings, so hosts and guests can rest easy knowing they’re covered.
- We’ve implemented strong processes and policies that are aligned with our strategy, helping us to scale our reliability and invest more in growing demand.
- We’ve maintained our vehicle quality requirements (age and distance requirements) and our policies around pre/post trip photos.
- We require hosts to file damage claims within 24 hours of a trip to ensure that we can properly attribute the damage to the right guest.
- We don’t allow branding or stickers on vehicles, to mitigate risk of vehicle theft.
All of these tactics and operational tenets are built upon years of experience, and have led to our successful results.
Hosts keep the marketplace humming
Hosts are the beating heart of our business and are pivotal to our success. As the largest peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace globally, Turo has created accessible, flexible, and entrepreneurial opportunities for hundreds of thousands of hosts. When I first started at Turo, I remember being deeply affected by the story of a mother in Florida who was so grateful that the Turo platform enabled her to run a fleet of luxury cars with her teenage children, eventually buying a house for the first time as a reward for her success.
Since then, I’ve met hundreds of Turo hosts (in Australia and abroad) with their own unique versions of that story. One of my primary motivators, has been to support their progress towards financial freedom.
So, over the last few weeks, with significant changes affecting our industry, our local team has been singularly focussed on helping owners and hosts to make their car sharing businesses successful on Turo.
We’ve collaborated directly with Uber, who are referring their car sharing community, both owners and borrowers, to shift across to Turo. In that spirit, I’d like to personally welcome hosts/owners from Uber Carshare, as well as guests looking for access to cars, to the Turo community. We’re truly delighted to have you — we love this business, we’re passionate about car sharing, and we’re committed to your success.
We’ve already begun hosting numerous online webinars and have scheduled in-person events across the country over the next few weeks. Plus, we’ve accelerated a change to vehicle eligibility age that was already on our roadmap, now allowing vehicles manufactured in or after 2013 (an additional two years on top of our previous 10 year age limitation). And as always, we’ll continue to take on feedback from our community about other potential changes, so long as they’re in keeping with our strategy and to the benefit of our entire host and guest community.
To help with the transition, our local Aussie team will continue to be available to all of you, to support your goals, your growth, your challenges and your triumphs. I wanted to introduce you to our Australian leadership team, who are responsible for the success we’ve shared so far and the aspirations we have for the future. Please feel free to connect with any of us directly!
