Diversity drives Turo across both our host and guest communities

The Turo community represents people of all kinds of backgrounds and walks of life. Whether by creating opportunities in entrepreneurship and an extra source of income for hosts, or by providing affordable mobility access and a way to explore local communities for guests, Turo has established itself as a platform to support others. In February 2022, we surveyed our hosts and guests asking about their thoughts and experiences with Turo, and received over 600 host responses and 7,000 guest responses. Survey findings revealed how diverse the community is, the economic impact Turo provides for hosts and guests, and how Turo helped our community navigate the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Turo community fuels our marketplace, and it’s full of a diverse array of unique perspectives, backgrounds, and passions. As peer-to-peer car sharing grows, so has the core of our community.

The Turo community of hosts and guests represents many different ethnic backgrounds and communities, and our community’s makeup is only becoming more diverse. In this survey we saw the number of Black/African-American respondents increase from 13% in 2019 to 21% in 2022. Turo enables entrepreneurial activity and can offset costs such as car loans, vehicle maintenance and cleaning, and credit card and student loan debt, which tend to impact low-income and non-White individuals at above-average rates. While rental car prices increased by 75% from 2019 to 2021, peer-to-peer car sharing provides an affordable alternative to traditional rental platforms. We’ve also seen changes reflected among our host community as well. While the proportion of surveyed non-White hosts was at 50% in 2019, the number of surveyed non-White hosts grew to 59% in 2022. Among surveyed hosts, Black/African-American host representation tripled from 2019 to 2022, and Hispanic/Latinx host representation also increased over that same period.

Turo has also been valuable for individuals who identify as female. Roughly 44% of all respondents (including guests and hosts) identified themselves as female. 34% of surveyed hosts identified themselves as female, which is roughly proportional to the share of car ownership by gender in the US in 2021. Interestingly, women were more greatly represented in our Black/African-American respondents than any other ethnic group — within that group, approximately 58% of surveyed guests and 46% of surveyed hosts identified as female. 

The community report also highlights some of the other unique backgrounds of our community. Roughly 9% of respondents identified as members of the LGBTQ+ community and 5% of respondents identified as having a disability. We also know that roughly 20% of surveyed hosts identified as an immigrant or refugee, which is twice what we found in 2019. Roughly 8% of our respondents came from our veteran community. Respondents reported a remarkably wide range of occupational jobs and careers, such as entrepreneurs and business owners, medical workers, teachers, educators, students, firefighters, law enforcement, emergency responders, government workers, union workers, and active duty military.