My Tesla Model 3’s last few months on Turo were pretty tragic. Before my blog crashed I wrote a bunch of posts about how bad it was performing compared to my other, much less expensive, cars. It was actually my worst performing car in 2023. And just as a reminder my other cars are Nissan Rogues and Sentras.
To be honest though I loved driving that car, and was actually planning to remove it from Turo and just drive it personally. It was booked for Labor Day weekend, and in my mind that was going to be its last hurrah. So of course it got hit while parked!
Luckily no one was hurt, and the car was still driveable. The guest returned it and I was able to drive it to a Tesla certified repair shop near by. They did the estimate, but delayed doing the actual repairs. So I ended up taking it to a Tesla repair shop that was much farther away. A few weeks later and it was ready to be re-listed on Turo.
It took over two months (and nearly $10k, mostly reimbursed by Turo) to get the car back on the road (mid-November). And it didn’t get booked until January. That trip went smoothly and then it got booked for the following weekend, so that gave me a little confidence that the car might be ready to rebound in 2024. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
On the next trip, I started getting notifications in the Tesla app that the car’s charge level was getting too low. I messaged the guest telling them to charge the car ASAP but they never replied. Then I saw that the car was parked with 0% charge. I again messaged the guest to find out what was going on and again, no answer.
A few hours passed with no response from the guest so I decided to file a damage claim for the battery, only to see that the guest had already filed an accident claim. I would later find out the notification email went to spam. She apparently spun out on a snowy road and hit another car and a pole. It was totaled. Turo paid out the claim directly to my lender.
And so ends the brief and underwhelming story of my Tesla on Turo. Low utilization followed by two accidents in three trips. I’m really happy no one was hurt, and honestly I’m happy the car is out of my fleet. I don’t think I’ll be adding anymore EVs anytime soon.
