I Rented My Tesla to a Stranger on Turo

Here’s how much money I made

I rented out my Tesla Model 3 on the peer-to-peer car rental app Turo. Photo courtesy of the author

These days, you can rent out nearly anything you own and earn some side income. Airbnb popularized the business model of letting people rent out their homes, and now similar companies let you rent out your boat, your garage storage, and even your backyard swimming pool.

I’ve used the app Turo to rent other people’s cars, but I’ve always been a bit wary of using it to rent out my own. Turo is the world’s largest car-sharing marketplace, allowing you to rent your car to a stranger and make a bit of money. When I was considering buying a Tesla, I rented one on Turo for a couple of days to really get a feel for what owning this car would be like.

I really liked the experience of renting on Turo but thought it was incredibly risky for the host. What if I had crashed the car or just not returned it?

Turo does provide insurance, but the headache that would entail makes it not worth it to most people. In addition to that, there have been horror stories of drivers using the cars for various illegal activities. So there are certainly some risks involved when renting out your car on Turo, but like Airbnb, the majority of people mean well and are unproblematic renters. It’s a very small pool of people who cause these issues, and the chances of running into that by just renting my car out once seemed slim, so I decided to try it out.

Earning potential of renting my Tesla on Turo

After browsing the Turo site, I noticed that Tesla owners could charge a bit more than cars of a similar class.

A Tesla Model 3 on Turo can easily rent for $90 a day and sometimes up to $200 per day. By comparison, something like an Audi A4 would only rent for around $50 a day.

When you do the math here, it becomes pretty enticing to rent your Tesla on Turo. If you rented it out for 20 days per month, you’d make about $1,400 (after Turo’s 30% cut).

Now, normally, I would never risk renting out my car to a stranger. But as a YouTuber, I knew this video idea was too good to resist.