Turo car-sharing marketplace launches in Germany

Peer-to-peer car-sharing platform Turo is expanding to Germany officially, starting today, after acquiring last September Daimler’s Croove in-house product for providing essentially the same service. Turo also received a significant strategic investment from Daimler at the same time, as it acquired the automaker’s car-sharing experiment, and it now operates peer-to-peer rental services in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. in addition to Germany.

Turo claims more than 200,000 vehicles listed on its service across its combined active markets, and more than 5 million total users registered on the platform. It’s also temporarily foregoing its commission on rentals during an introductory promotion period through July 2018 to celebrate bringing the service to Germany, something it hopes to help it lead the market in the country by the end of the year.

In Germany, Turo is teaming with Allianz to insure vehicles on its platform against costs related to accidents and damages, on both the owner and the renter side. The company touts its ability to provide specific makes and models of cars at lower costs versus traditional rentals as key advantages to how it operates for consumers.

On the car owner side, Turo says its platform provides people with a way to defray the cost of buying and operating a vehicle. In some cases, Turo has shown that owners can completely cover the cost of their lease agreements by making their vehicle available on the platform for as few as nine days per month.

As automakers look to alternatives to individual ownership, or to incentives for people to keep buying, something like Turo makes a lot of sense to back and promote. Mobility service models in the future will combine multiple approaches, including things like car sharing, and Turo’s platform and offerings like it could figure prominently in how the industry evolves over time.