Zoom, zooming on a weekend getaway with a Porsche rented through Turo - The Boston Globe (2025)

He doesn’t have a Kia, Subaru, or Ford poster on his bedroom wall. He’s got a big black banner, with a black and red logo in the middle and the word “Stuttgart.” As in Germany. As in Porsche.

How could I rent a weekend Porsche?

I had heard about Turo, the car-sharing app that works the same way as Airbnb, where people offer up their vehicles instead of their homes for rent. But this required a little research before handing over my credit card for some stranger’s car keys.

Searching the app for cars in Orlando was easy. Dozens of options surfaced immediately, from a Dodge Grand Caravan for $61 a day to an American muscle car, a 2023 Dodge Charger, for $440 a day, to a gorgeous 2019 Lamborghini Huracan for $767 a day. I priced out how much it would cost to rent a car the traditional way, and decided I was willing to just about double that. So if Hertz cost me $150 or $200 for the weekend, I’d go as high as $300 or $350. A splurge, but not a reckless one.

After a little Googling, I found stories about Turo in two categories. The good news focused on its success over 15 years, with 150,000 hosts, 350,000 vehicle listings, 3.5 million guests, and revenue growth to $958 million in 2024.

The other stories were mostly about two tragedies that both happened on New Year’s Day. In one event, a driver rented a Ford F-150 Lightning on Turo and drove it into a New Orleans crowd, killing 14 people. In the other, a driver rented a Tesla Cybertruck and parked it in front of Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, where it exploded. In both cases, Turo cooperated with law enforcement and released a statement saying it was “heartbroken by the violence perpetrated in New Orleans and Las Vegas.”

My further research focused on dozens of car reviews online from various cities, and after that, I felt comfortable going forward.

When I clicked the button for “Porsche” in Orlando, a list of pictures came up. There were a couple 911 models ranging between $200 and $400 a day that would have been amazing, but were beyond my budget. There were some Cayennes and Macans, but those were just fast SUVs, and they didn’t feel special enough. And then I saw it — a sleek, charcoal 2016 Porsche Panamera. It was priced at $71 a day, I presumed because it was an older model. When I typed in my dates, it fell right in my sweet spot, between $300 and $350 for the weekend once I factored in Turo’s rental fees and gas.

It looked fast, as a Porsche should. It had been rented more than 70 times and had a 4.99-star rating. Users called it a “beautiful drive” and “clean” and praised the owner for being responsive. The description of the car said “this sedan is well cared for and will provide you with a luxury sedan experience,” and that it was detailed after every use.

I was sold. I reserved it and spent the next few days messaging back and forth on the app with the car’s owner, who explained the next steps. I had to send him a photo of me holding my driver’s license. I’d receive the parking location at the airport where I would find it. The car would have a box in the window containing the car key. They would send me a code to unlock the box and drive away. And at the end of the trip, I was to leave it in the same lot, take pictures of the car’s interior and exterior and upload them to the app, put the key in the lock box, and walk away.

The hardest part for me was keeping the secret. It got all the sweeter when my son got annoyed that I hadn’t consulted him about the boring car I had no doubt rented. And when our plane landed in Orlando and he showed me the Porsche his friend’s dad rented for them in Florida, I had to bite my tongue so hard it almost bled.

He started to grow curious when we bypassed the signs for the car rental agencies, and he grew frustrated when I got confused in the parking lot and went in the wrong direction. But then I spotted it, casually rested my golf bag, walked over, and said, “Oh, here’s our car.” He froze, then smirked. He may have cracked a joke about it being a 2016 Porsche, but I ignored him.

Here’s what I’ll say about driving our 2016 Panamera. Yes, it was quick out of the gate when a light turned green. And yes, when I hit the gas while cruising at 70 on I-4 in Orlando, it had a whole other level that my Subaru Crosstrek back home only dreams about. But where I really enjoyed the experience was on the corners, when I could accelerate on a highway ramp or a sharp city turn and feel absolutely no lean, as the car hugged the road like a warm blanket. I thought back to high school, when Tom Cruise eluded the pimp in the “Risky Business” car chase and calmly stated, “Porsche, there is no substitute.”

Dropoff was easy. I took pictures of various angles, inside and out, to upload to the app as proof that I left it clean and undamaged. We put the key in the lockbox and walked away. No paperwork. No line. No rental counter.

Back home, I had a few more questions about Turo. I reached out and was put in touch with Andrew Mok, Turo’s chief marketing officer. He filled in my gaps, starting with some basic numbers, including that Turo cars have driven 8.6 million miles and taken 27 million trips. Turo was founded in Boston by Shelby Clark, who has said that he got the idea after biking past hundreds of parked cars while going to rent a Zipcar. (Clark left the company in 2013.)

Mok said the company is growing year over year, is profitable despite having less than 10 percent of the car rental market, and has roughly 1,000 employees. The business was built around the idea of “skipping the rental counter,” having no upsell on insurance or worrying about whether, as Jerry Seinfeld famously learned, you would actually get the midsize sedan that you reserved.

“People want to try out the new Porsche or the Tesla Model 3 or the Rivian, and Turo has 1,500 makes and models on the website,” Mok said. And with 338,000 vehicles in the system, if you want to spend $20 a day, you can, or you can spend $500.

Some people, he said, use Turo to rent the exact Honda Odyssey they own, to take a family road trip to Florida because they are familiar with the drive and it fits their car seats for their kids. Longer rentals, for weeks and months, are becoming more common, he said. Others rent for just a day or two because they’ve always been curious to drive a vintage Corvette or Mustang or the “latest and greatest EV.”

When I asked about the hosts, the people willing to hand over their car keys to strangers like me, he said there are two types: Casual car owners who have an extra vehicle sitting in a driveway and want to make a little money off it, and small business entrepreneurs who maybe own several cars specifically to rent them out. I asked how many cars come back damaged or dinged, and he said “less than .1 percent of trips.”

And finally, I asked about Jan. 1 and how the company managed one day and two tragedies.

“It was very clearly a tragic day,” he said. “The first thing on everybody’s mind was how can we help. We had no idea if the two incidents were connected, we just worked with law enforcement to make sure nobody else got hurt.”

Mok said neither of the two men showed anything major in their backgrounds that might have caused alarm. But the company still made changes, including working with counterterrorism experts. Hosts can now call a hot line with safety concerns that will connect them with law enforcement. “We’re taking steps to shore up anything we can do,” he said.