Although P2P companies originally envisioned hosts as the owners of a single vehicle, this model has evolved significantly. For example, in 2022 Turo stated in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that four types of hosts rent out vehicles on its platform:

• Owners leasing 1 or 2 cars with the goal of offsetting their cost of vehicle ownership (i.e., consumer hosts);
• Owners leasing 3 to 9 cars in order to generate a second income (i.e., small business hosts);
• Owners leasing 10 or more cars, often as their primary source of income or as part of an existing business, who may choose to invest in (and in many cases have invested in) resources to support their operations, such as employees and parking (i.e., professional hosts); and
• Small or existing rental car companies that rent out their cars through Turo’s website and do not use Turo’s other offerings, such as insurance (i.e., commercial vendors).

4.2 Profile of P2P Vehicle Owners

There is limited publicly available information about the hosts who use P2P carsharing services to list their vehicles for rent. At the time this research was conducted, two of the largest P2P companies, Turo and Getaround, were filing for initial public offerings (IPOs) and, accordingly, had filed documents with the SEC providing details about their business model, including about their hosts.

Turo (2022) filed an S-1 registration statement and two amendments with the SEC in advance of its IPO filing. Figure 4-1 presents historical data about active hosts (i.e., a host with at least one trip starting within the previous 12 months) and vehicle listings through March 2023, according to those disclosures.

Based on information available on Turo’s website and its 2022 SEC filings, a small number of hosts account for a large number of cars (sometimes hundreds) rented out on Turo’s platform. For example, LA Auto Spot advertises itself as the “largest host on Turo,” offering “over 800 vehicles for rent” across multiple cities. Per the New York Times, this is a significant change from the company’s

original intent of providing vehicle owners with passive income when they are not using their vehicles (Belson 2010).

As previously described, Turo’s 2022 SEC filings break down its hosts into the four categories, although the filings do not disclose what percentage falls into each category or what percentage of its revenue is attributable to consumer hosts, small business hosts, professional hosts, or commercial vendors. The Turo filings note that many small business and professional hosts began on Turo’s platform as consumer hosts and then later scaled up their businesses to make additional profits, suggesting that many of Turo’s hosts are small businesses (i.e., 3 to 9 cars) or professional hosts (i.e., more than 10 cars). In its SEC filings Turo states that commercial vendors—traditional rental car companies that use Turo’s platform but not its other offerings—had made up less than 1 percent of Turo’s net revenue in the prior two fiscal years, 2020 and 2021.

Similarly, Getaround’s S-4 registration statement discloses that a “significant majority of [its] overall revenue depends on . . . Powerhosts” (those who typically list eight or more vehicles for rent) but “the amount of and the percentage of revenue represented by these hosts varies from period to period, sometimes significantly.” Getaround actively recruits its Powerhosts from either (1) approaching its existing individual hosts, 25 percent of whom are “converted” to Powerhosts or (2) actively marketing to small fleets that rent vehicles on their own or through other P2P platforms (InterPrivate II Form S-4 and Amendment No. 1, 2022).

Getaround describes the pathway of its individual hosts to Powerhosts as follows:

Since 2015, we’ve seen Powerhosts expand organically. This growth is really driven by the powerful flywheel and the network effects of our marketplace model. Powerhosts actually typically start with a couple cars. And then as those cars reach a steady state of earnings generation, the host often requires more cars to share. This effect translates into cohorts that grow, not churn over time, and results in more cars added to our platform at an effective customer acquisition cost of zero. (InterPrivate II and Getaround 2022)

A July 2023 Wall Street Journal article described how Turo and Getaround allow hosts to earn money by renting out cars they are not using. The article reports that 70 percent of Getaround’s active cars are rented out by Powerhosts who own three cars or more, with several renting out hundreds of cars and at least one having more than a thousand cars. It indicates that in a good month a Powerhost can net about $1,000 per vehicle leased. Some Getaround Powerhosts acquire automobiles for the sole purpose of renting them to customers via the company’s app (Eisen 2023).

A study performed in July 2017 found that despite consumers’ high interest in P2P carsharing, participation rates at that time lagged projections, which was mainly attributable to lack of participating hosts in the P2P carsharing market (Wilhelms, Merfeld, and Henkel 2017). As noted, both Turo and Getaround have evolved from business models focusing on hosts listing one or two vehicles to offset car ownership and toward models through which hosts offer numerous vehicles as part of a carsharing business, which has presumably helped mitigate the lack of hosts.

4.3 Profile of P2P Customers

According to Turo’s 2022 registration statement and amendments, the company had more than 1.3 million active customers (i.e., “guests”) as of September 30, 2021; 2 million active guests as of March 31, 2022; and 2.3 million active guests as of June 30, 2022. In turn, Getaround reported in its 2022 registration statement and amendment more than 1.6 million unique guests as of March 31, 2022.

The Turo registration statement shows no consistent profile for guests who rent cars on the platform, but (according to Turo) they do so for the following reasons: local getaways; destination vacations; business travel; international travel; car replacement; flexible month-to-month

access; hyperlocal, instant access; try-before-you-buy extended test drives; dream drives in luxury, exotic, and classic cars; upgraded trips with upscale cars; outdoor adventures in camper and conversion vans; and moving and running errands in trucks and vans. Turo estimated that in 2021, approximately 32 percent of their transactions were bookings 7 to 30 days in length, and approximately 5 percent of transactions were bookings more than 30 days in length.

The characteristics of P2P customers, as well as their reasons for using P2P carsharing services, vary widely. In a 2014 local perspective piece that evaluated early consumer interest in P2P carsharing in the San Francisco Bay area, the top three reasons were (1) convenience and availability, (2) monetary savings, and (3) expanded mobility options (Ballús-Armet et al. 2014). In 2018, another study identified characteristics of P2P customers in the Bay Area and concluded that users tended to be white, male, and younger and more educated than the general population: 86 percent had a graduate degree or higher and about 55 percent used the platform once per month or more (the most frequent users—8 percent of the sample—employed the platform five or more times per month) (Shaheen, Martin, and Bansal 2018).

P2P carsharing is attractive to younger consumers because traditional car rental companies allow only individuals 25 years of age or older to rent (Finnegan 2022). Some P2P companies allow vehicle owners to reduce the age of allowable renters to 18 years. P2P customers may prefer to use a carsharing service because they believe it is less expensive than traditional car rental companies and appreciate that car owners earn money. Fees for traditional rental car companies, which, as noted, increased because of the COVID-19 pandemic, lack of vehicles, and fuel shortages, might have pushed more customers to P2P companies (Finnegan 2022). For some customers P2P carsharing is “an opportunity to pick the exact type of vehicle for less than a traditional rental car company charges.” Other customers are attracted to renting in their neighborhood, rather than traveling to a rental agency (Schmidt and Deryckere 2020).

Not all customers are transplants from traditional rental car companies. For example, London-based P2P carsharing company Hiyacar advertises that it has a positive effect on the environment. Customers concerned about the environment may see trends such as decreased emissions, less congestion, and collaborative consumption as a perk of P2Ps. P2P carsharing is also attractive to households that do not own their own vehicles. It is reported that “the flexibility of P2P carsharing removes the need to permanently own one. It means people can have access to a vehicle for the completion of any short trips and errands, rather than having to invest in a car of their own” (Hiyacar 2019).