Analyzing Turo’s Calculator’s Data Accuracy
Successful Turo hosts need to know exactly how much they can expect their car investments to earn (or ROI) before making a vehicle purchase.
For this reason, Turo maintains a Carculator that allows you to input your location and budget and the calculator will estimate the expected annual earnings of popular vehicles in that location.
Wow! According to Turo, all we need to do is purchase a Ford Focus and the Turo estimator predicts we’ll make a 245% ROI! We should obviously do this instead of investing in the stock market or in other reliable assets!
Or is this profit calculator too good to be true & biased to convince potential Turo hosts to list their cars so it can become a more valuable platform, regardless if you profit or not?
Turo’s Claimed Earnings
Turo claims these to be the average annual earnings for the following makes & models in the New York metro area (calculated on 4/11/2024):
- Ford Focus: $8,554/year
- Mitsubishi Mirage G4: $8,130/year
- Mitsubishi Mirage: $7,244/year
- Volkswagen Jetta: $10,192/year
- Honda Fit: $9,714/year
Estimating Actual Revenue
Since Turo doesn’t really care if you go bankrupt or not, we want to fact-check the above calculator output with scraped data from Turo’s website. While Turo does not publicly reveal the average annual earnings of each car, we can compute the estimated lifetime earnings of each vehicle publicly listed by multiplying the number of completed trips times the average daily price:
Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips) = vehicles.completedTrips x vehicles.avgDailyPrice.amount
Trip Length Assumption
Note that this estimate will be on the low end as we’re assuming all trips last only one day. However, we know it’s common for many Turo cars to be rented a few days at a time, so we just want to highlight that all of the following estimates assume this.
Lifetime vs. Yearly
We should also mention that lifetime earnings will obviously exceed annual earnings if the car has been on Turo for more than one year. While it is possible to check how long each car has been listed on Turo, we’re only considering lifetime earnings here.
Scraping Turo Data
We’ll use our Turo Data Scraper to legally collect the earnings data as we browse the Turo website normally (without automated access or violating its Terms).
We’ll specifically run a targeted search for New York (which includes metro areas like New Jersey & Long Island) and filter the cars by make and model. We’ll then export a HAR file and run it through the Turo Scraper to extract out the data and analyze it using the “Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips)” formula cited above for each make and model:
Results
Below are the results, where for each make and model we include a link so you can run the search for yourself and replicate our results. Note that this analysis was done on 4/11/2024, so data will obviously change in the future!
One specific item to note is that we were surprised with how few cars there are for these top makes and models Turo features on its Calculator. Some makes and models only had 4 active listings, yet were featured as one of the top 5 cars on Turo’s calculator.
Ford Focus
Ford Focus in New York Turo Search Results
Number of Cars: 40
Average Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips): $979.45
Maximum Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips): $3,556.99
Turo Carculator Estimate: $8,554/year
Mitsubishi Mirage G4
Mitsubishi Mirage G4 in New York Turo Search Results
Number of Cars: 4
Average Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips): $2,018.84
Maximum Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips): $3,972.33
Turo Carculator Estimate: $8,130/year
Mitsubishi Mirage
Mitsubishi Mirage in New York Turo Search Results
Number of Cars: 5
Average Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips): $1,854.83
Maximum Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips): $3,360.00
Turo Carculator Estimate: $7,244/year
Volkswagen Jetta
Volkswagen Jetta in New York Turo Search Results
Number of Cars: 59
Average Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips): $2,529.31
Maximum Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips): $8,386.10
Turo Carculator Estimate: $10,192/year
Honda Fit
Honda Fit in New York Turo Search Results
Number of Cars: 19
Average Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips): $2,803.69
Maximum Est. Lifetime Revenue (1 day trips): $6,711.75
Turo Carculator Estimate: $9,714/year
Conclusions
It’s difficult to draw any significant conclusions with the above data, since we’re essentially comparing apples to oranges. However, if we assume that the average vehicle for each make and model has been listed for 1 year, we can infer the required average daily trip length for the math to match Turo’s estimates.
Ford Focus: $8,554 / $979.45 = 8.73 days
Mitsubishi Mirage G4: $8,130 / $2,018.84 = 4.03 days
Mitsubishi Mirage: $7,244 / $1,854.83 = 3.91 days
Volkswagen Jetta: $10,192 / $2,529.31 = 4.03 days
Honda Fit: $9,714 / $2,803.69 = 3.46 days
If the Turo Calculator is correct and the average car for each of these makes and models has been active for 1 year, then these numbers seem reasonable as each car will have to be rented for about 4 days except for the Ford Focus.
Since the Ford Focus is a bit of an outlier here, it stands to reason that the average listing is 1/2 years active instead of 1 (maybe because Turo keeps pushing them on the market), which would explain why the inferred average trip length is double the other cars.
Can We Trust It?
As 4-day average trip lengths seem reasonable (though a bit high, we’d expect them to be maybe 1-2 instead, but this could be accounted for the average age of the listings), it seems like the Carculator is generally accurate.
However, as we’ve pointed out above that some of the estimates are drawn from only 4 data points, we would be extremely cautious in trusting it to make a financial decision unless we were sure that the make and model had enough data points in the given market to trust it.
So we say you can trust the Carculator, but make sure you check the number of listings for any make and model in your target market to make sure you’re not drawing a conclusion over only 4 data points.
Do Your Own Research
As always, do your own research and only consider Turo’s suggestions with data from other sources like from the official Turo website. If you’d like to scrape this data for yourself, why not check out our Turo Data Scraper and get started for free.