Turo Hosts Watch, Critique Renter Driving Habits on TikTok

If information about Hertz wrongly having clients arrested has put you off renting a automotive from the standard sources, you might need thought-about Turo as a back-up possibility. The issue is, your Turo host could be monitoring you — they usually may even be bitching about your driving on social media.

Turo is a peer-to-peer car-sharing service that goals to do what Airbnb has completed for dwelling leases; customers reserve a automotive from an Common Joe, with all interactions completed through Turo’s interface. And similar to Airbnb, Turo hosts can get somewhat anal about the best way you deal with their automobiles.

Take Kyle and John, Turo hosts who run @drivetheemeraldcoast on TikTok, for instance. These hosts not solely use a monitoring gadget known as Bouncie to maintain tabs on their automobiles, however additionally they then take to TikTok to critique the driving expertise of their renters.

See, Kyle and John have a Porsche Boxster that they lease out on Turo — however they spend plenty of time watching the best way renters use their automobile, critiquing them for fast acceleration and onerous braking. Whereas the 2 often observe that they “anticipated” this to occur, they nonetheless specific shock as individuals driving a sports activities automotive with a heavy foot.

That’s as a result of Bouncie, which will be plugged into your automobile’s OBDII port, tracks your location, velocity, acceleration, and braking, sending all of it to an app on the host’s telephone.

It does make sense why hosts are inclined to trace this stuff. As The Drive reviews, one Turo host was in a position to get well a Tesla Mannequin 3 {that a} renter had disassembled to check match aftermarket elements by monitoring the automotive’s actions.

Turo explicitly permits for monitoring gadgets in its automobiles, and generally, hosts don’t need to disclose that the automobile you’re renting is provided with these gadgets. Hosts who take to social media often inform different hosts not to reveal the presence of those gadgets.

On one hand, I completely perceive the impetus to need to monitor your property to ensure your automotive’s security by the hands of a stranger. On the opposite, there’s one thing extremely creepy about somebody figuring out your precise location always. I as soon as stayed in a rental property and forgot to lock the door, and the host texted me to remind me to take action… as a result of he had a digicam in the home. I obtained the hell out of Dodge, and I do know I’d need to do the identical factor if a complete stranger began to textual content me about my driving habits as a result of they knew precisely the place I used to be. I’d even be extraordinarily weirded out to later uncover that these strangers had been making movies about me afterward.