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Comment by woodpanel | Hacker News Reader

Very early adopter here (and little later even snapped a developer job there). Very sad to see, but if you were an insider I think it was clear for at least 5 years now, that this business was not going to last.

The sharing economy to me, looks more like a sustainability-simulation of its business models, driven by yield-seeking funds and millenial-pockets which, freed of the burden to buy property, are open to add hefty premiums to their every day expenditures (e.g. "checkout that new roastery run by that reknown barista").

Yet these businesses failiures become eminent once you realize that they aren't even viable in cities with less than 2M people.

Daimler/BMW is just facing up to this reality. If car2go were VC funded, we would see more money being thrown at this bottomless pit.

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With car rental the true business model often is not in renting out the cars, but second market when selling the cars after a year. The rental earnings have to cover loss of value. The profits come from selling efficiently.

The deal with Daimler and BMW doing this is also to attract future generations of buyers. It is said that users of "car sharing" are younger folks (not necessarily my observation, but what do I know) ND the hope is that when they become older, get married, get children and need their own car at fixed in the premium brands. No idea if that equations works out, though.

I dunnoh... Turo seems to be doing well.

Turo doesn't own the underlying asset that they're renting out, and is just a marketplace for others to bear the capital costs of buying a car, and most of the operational costs of keeping it running.

Their model is quite different than car2go's, which involved buying cars, keeping them safe and running, etc.

The only way for something to be profitable as online business, aside from e-commerce, is being a "platform". Ephemeral, little assets, just man-in-the-middle. Operating costs are basically determined by server centers and employees...

Anything real like cars on the road seemingly goes belly-up within a few years unless VCs throw money at it for no reason other than hype.

I've talked to some people who have Turo based businesses. They're doing well.

I hosted on Turo (all star host). I don’t anymore and won’t ever again. It’s not worth the time or headache.

I don’t think Getaround or Turo will last much longer without a lot more VC funding.

Just curious what problems you had with Turo?

I never hosted but I used it a few times, and I have a few friends who host, so my experience is obviously anecdotal but I've only heard good things..

Do you want somebody renting your personal car? I mean, rental cars have the saying “drive it like a rental for a reason”. Your car will get totaled or somebody will smoke weed in it or leave a bag of uncapped needles. People will return it miles away from the drop point or not even return it at all. They won’t fill the tank, leaving you to drive to the gas station and fill it. They’ll rent it and than swap your working battery for their broken batter. Take the tires off and swap them with their shitty bald ones.

The only people who make money (like real money and not pretend “profit” that doesn’t account for everything I listed) are people who buy cars specifically to rent out on Turo. They don’t get attached to any of the cars because those things will get fucked.

> The only people who make money (like real money and not pretend “profit” that doesn’t account for everything I listed) are people who buy cars specifically to rent out on Turo. They don’t get attached to any of the cars because those things will get fucked.

Which is exactly what rental companies do. If Those private individuals can be any cheaper than Hertz & co with their huge discounts, it's just VC money being thrown at it, not a sustainable business model.

Alternatively Turo will make money because people don’t realize the costs of renting a car is far more than their immediate expenses.

They won’t factor in the costs of a crash, or reduced life, or if the insurance companies catch up then the additional insurance cost.

Turo’s profit lies in having unsavvy hosts pick up these costs.

Turo includes insurance for the rental period, so I don't see where there'd be significant additional insurance costs.

Honestly, the handful of hosts I've worked with are basically operating their own rental businesses and simply preferred Turo's deal vs. franchising with one of the big names.

This is what insurance is for, I guess?

I dunno, this all feels like edge cases and not the kind of thing the average person would do. Or if a Turo member did this, they would get away with it once, and then be banned from the platform.

These all sound like ridiculous scenarios out of a bad cop show. Do you have any evidence that this has happened to any Turo hosts?

If this was the norm, these services would not exist.

Did previous generations not go out to eat? Or did they save money by going to Applebee's and Red Lobster over smaller, local options?

I don't understand your point. Feel free to elaborate!

If you mean the Roastery example: it is just one example of "premiums" urban millennials add to their expenditures. Short-Renting a car or ubering around isn't cheap in the long term either.

But while I'm at it: Whenever my first-world-native colleagues discuss things like, whether coffee should be made in an Aeropress or a Hario Syphon, for hours, it usually takes a glimpse towards my second- or third-world born colleagues faces to find confirmation, that this is just first-world nonsense.

Presumably those are your colleagues, i.e. highly paid software developers with disposable income who already have a good shot at the housing ladder?

Presumably, a place with well paid software developers is usually crowded with a lot more software developers. So renting, not a problem. But buying: still not cheap. Add to this: you don’t buy if you don’t know how long you’re going to stay.

In my experience, growing up in the 80s, people went out FAR less than people do today. Food in general was seen in a very different light. Food was just a thing that you did a couple of times a day. There was very little cultural importance placed on it. At least for the people I knew (I did grow up spending a year or two in 9 different cities).

Mostly they did not and cooked at home instead. At least most people most of the time.

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