Turo CEO launches Verified FSD integration with Tesla, reveals $1.2B revenue and path to autonomous car delivery

Speaker 2: Andre, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Doing well. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thanks for me.

Speaker 2: For hopping on. First time on the show. We'd love a little bit of backstory on you, key initiatives for the company and then the news today.

Speaker 8: Great. Happy to jump in. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Can you kick us off with a little bit your your corporate journey and then some of what you're working on at Turo?

Speaker 8: Sure. I actually just celebrated last month my fifteenth anniversary with Turo. Amazing. So my Jesus. Been reinventing car rental for the last fifteen years.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 8: As you probably know, I hope you've used Turo already for some of your travel and trying out new cars. Yes. Yeah. We've been bringing, you know, this notion of peer to peer car sharing to the market now for over fifteen years. We're delighted to continue to grow the business. This year, we'll do around 1,200,000,000 in revenue out of 3,300,000,000 in TBP.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Boom.

Speaker 8: We are excited to announce some exciting technological enhancements to our platform today. Yeah. We'll talk more about that if you like, in the show. We're bringing, Tesla FSD integration into Turo. So now you can actually experience AVs Yep. By renting a car, on Turo, specifically the Model three and Model y. So very excited about that. So I rented a Tesla with FSD on Turo, like,

Speaker 2: a couple weeks ago. It was a fantastic experience. I wound up just, like, searching or filtering. This was before you had the verified integration. And I was able to verify that it was hardware four, which is like the good FSD in this model year and whatever. But it was it was, I guess, like, maybe a little cumbersome, and so you've made it easier. But I'm interested in, how are you vending this for the customer? How are you surfacing this? How are you verifying it? Like, why is it important to have an actual product strategy around this initiative?

Speaker 8: Well, great that you've experienced it and you've sort of hacked your way to it. Yeah. We saw a lot of people doing exactly what you were doing, and that's what got us thinking about just making it easier Yeah. To your point, and making it verifiable. So, you know, Tesla is a very popular make and and, you know, on Turo. The model three and and Model y are respectively the fourth and third most popular cars that are rented on Turo. And Really quickly, what's one and two? I gotta know. One and two kind of are I think the BMW three series

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 8: And the Toyota Prius.

Speaker 1: Oh, interesting. Interesting.

Speaker 8: Yeah. Cool.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I was hoping you'd I

Speaker 2: was hoping for the Urus. No. Urus. Urus Urus would be good. Yes. But

Speaker 1: had such a Corbin's still on there. I realized like I was like, wait, a Turo I can just rent any car Yeah. That I want like in my backyard for This a was like I would, you know, when I graduated college and I had this realization I would just do it Saturday, I'd go and get like a Porsche. Back then I was very I was super limited because I was probably 22 at the time. Mhmm. And I wasn't clearing like certain people on tour, they're like, you can rent this car but you gotta be, you know, at Yes, least like, gotta be at least 30. Yeah. You guys let people set whatever age they want. Yeah. But I have amazing, very fond memories of of doing

Speaker 8: that. Amazing. I I'm a host on Turo. As you may see from my background screen, I've been hosting some of my cars for the last fifteen years and just completed a trip late last night. Two actually trips. My Audi r eight was out and my nine eleven since There you talked about

Speaker 1: we go. There we go. Yeah. There you go. Thank you for your service. Thank you for

Speaker 2: your service. I have

Speaker 8: the, 2012, Audi r eight GT, which as you may know, is a limited edition. Amazing. Only only 300 of those were made. But anyway, circling back to to to why we're excited about the experience of, you know, renting FSD on... To... Tesla FSD on Turo. Yeah. Well, you'll see on Wednesday, we're launching the actual product on Wednesday. We built actually a bunch of software to to enable it. Mhmm. First was building direct API integration with Tesla, so we are delighted to partner with them. Their teams have been amazing to work with. We have that direct integration with the API to check the, you know, eligibility of the vehicle as well as the FSD status of the vehicle. We wanna make sure that, you know, what we're presenting to our guests, our customers who are gonna rent the car, we wanna make sure that they actually have FSD enabled. Mhmm. And that, you know, the subscription is being paid for and it's current, and we're gonna check that right at the beginning of the trip to make sure that it's effective, you know, for for the start time of the trip. And also, you know, we have more Teslas than we have Teslas enabled with FSDs. So one of the cool things that we've done with our partners at Tesla is we're offering those hosts that have eligible Teslas but don't have yet an active FSD subscription, a one month free trial. Mhmm. This way, they'll be able to add it for free for a month. Hopefully, they'll see a lot of business from their Turo guests that are gonna be booking their cars and become, you know, long term and have subscribers to Dassault FSD and and help drive the success of that great piece of technology.

Speaker 1: Do you have a charging integration yet? Like, if if a Turo rents Yes. We do. Because that feels important because if you're the owner of the car and then you're getting billed for Sure. Like directly Yes.

Speaker 8: It's very very important. We have we have that integration on the charging side. It still goes through the host's account, but we automatically take the... Got it. All of the EV charging that's happened, you know, during the trip and and at the end of the trip, and we automatically bill our guests based on that direct integration. So we've we've made that simple, you know, a couple of years ago, and now we're taking on FSD, which I think will make a seamless experience for for both hosts and guests. So anyway, now that we built this API integration, we can actually surface with confidence in a newly created sort of section of the app that you'll see going live on on Wednesday, you know, these vehicles, the the Tesla vehicles that that have FSD. And then when you book the car, you'll be able to be assured that you'll have, you know, an eligible vehicle that have an FSD that is active, and you'll be able to experience the magic of FSD.

Speaker 2: This I'm thinking I heard a story about someone who was able to use Smart Summon on their on their FSD enabled Tesla to have it pick them up at the airport, which I don't even know if that's supposed to work that way. It feels a little too hard. When I think about Smart Summit, think, like, within the parking lot, but I guess it's technically a parking lot, so it worked at this particular airport. Wow.

Speaker 8: And not heard of

Speaker 4: it bad.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Incredible. And so and so what I'm thinking is like there's a future where the range gets further and further and a Turo host will be able to say, okay, this this Turo customer wants to rent the car. They want it delivered to their house which is, you know, a mile away. Just send the car over there and then they have access to the car with FSD for their weekend or whatever they whatever they want to do. And it's sort of like a more advanced robo taxi precursor. Very, very interesting for the for the business.

Speaker 8: Yeah. We're... That's why we're very excited about AVs. Yeah. You know, of course, starting with Tesla. Yeah. And hopefully, as the the technology spreads to other car builders and manufacturers, you know, we think that this will be a phenomenal kind of enhancement to our Turo rental experience. To your point Yeah. Removes a lot of the friction of picking up and dropping off a vehicle, whether it's at the airport or the hotel or the home or the business location. You know, imagine if we can actually turn all of these cars into an FSD like experience in the future where you can, you know, book your road trip and then the car comes and picks you up at the airport or your hotel. Then you can keep it for, you know, the few days or the week or whatever. You have the the car for you. You don't have to hop in and out of robotaxis because you might be going, you know, to, you know, some, you know, destination that's not a very urban destination.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. That's gonna be... I mean, it's gonna be really really powerful for the business. Especially the two factors. Like, one, the summon the summon element I think is gonna be amazing because somebody will be able to list their car. Like, when when that gets like to Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Widespread adoption and and greater range. Somebody can say like, yeah, want a car and that somebody can list their car on Turo. At the car, we'll just drive to the airport at the right time and be available for the person. And then the other thing is like Tesla is so techno... It is a piece of technology. It's not like a car that's been technology enabled. So even things like keys, it's like automatically give this person like effectively a copy of the key in the Turo app.

Speaker 2: That's what already happens. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. But that when like compared to like an owner being like, well, I gotta put the key

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: Just grab it. It's on the... Like I've I've probably had an experience back in the day was like, I'll meet you on the side of the road Yeah. Give you the key or the key is on the back right tire. And it's like those those things are like wildly inefficient and and Totally inefficient.

Speaker 8: Yes. Not not very safe either. Totally. You know, so the keys can get lost, you know, etcetera. So, we're very excited about that. I think, you know, we recently integrated with some flight tracking and flight information. So you can imagine, just enter your flight information. Yeah. We'll know exactly when your time... When your, you know, your flight is arriving. Sure. We'll we'll estimate exactly when the car should be meeting you at the airport. We have now permits. Turo has permits to conduct business in over 200 airports in The US, so we can actually have the car safely go to the permitted location. Mhmm. We'll be able to show you on the Turo app where the car is located, which we already do today, but it will just happen in real time because of the FSD integration. It just makes for an entirely different rental car experience.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Last question for me. What is what what is the bottleneck to growth for you? What is it's such a beautiful business model as a marketplace, but are you spending a lot on marketing? Like, what is driving growth this year? And because I can't imagine that, like, higher gas prices affect you all that much. It has probably a little bit of an effect, but no more than any other business related to cars. But what is the biggest the biggest chunk of cost in the business these days?

Speaker 8: Well, you know, what's unique about the Turo business is we take on a lot of the risks that can happen, you know, during a trip. Whether that's, you know, a fender bender or a more significant, you know, incident or any unpaid incidental. So, you know, over the last few years, we've been perfecting, our ability to manage risk and to be, very good at predicting risk and and ensuring that we avoid kind of the trips that are risky and then focus on the the trips that are the most profitable, the least risky trips. So that's been a lot of the things that we've been doing behind the scenes that you don't necessarily see when you're actually using the app because you, you know, this is sort of behind the surface. And that's, I think, been the biggest bottleneck. You know, we we wanted to get to a place where we can be really good at risk management.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 8: And we're feeling great about the progress we've made there. You know, we've been growing, you know, our our business primarily focused on our most profitable trips. As a result, our profitability has dramatically increased in in '26, and, you know, we expect it to continue to grow significantly in '27. That I think is the biggest bottleneck. Yeah. And then secondly, continue to build awareness. Know, the the Turo brand is is very well known with, you know, the car enthusiasts like yourselves and and and others that are tech enthusiasts. But I think we still haven't penetrated the the... Fully penetrated the sort of the mass market of travel. Mhmm. And so we're very focused on driving a lot of brand awareness and brand building, you know, demands kind of capture, we call it internally type of activities. We've got a brand new campaign that's been alive now for a few months. You may have caught it on screens, rent a car, not a rental car.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 8: You know, so we're we're building the brand and I think that's gonna help us drive growth alongside with great technology improvements and perfections of the service, over the next few years.

Speaker 1: Amazing. Well, we hope this interview helps Yeah. Drive increased growth and profitability. Because if you needed a if you needed a sign to go and rent a Porsche or an R8 this weekend, this is it. Yeah. Gotta get some sleighs on there too.

Speaker 2: Christmas is coming.

Speaker 1: Great to hang and yeah, great to finally meet.

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