The trucks in two fatal events on New Year’s Day — the attack in New Orleans and the explosion in Las Vegas — were both rented through Turo, a peer-to-peer platform on which private owners make vehicles available.
The San Francisco-based company issued a statement saying it is cooperating in both investigations, and added: “We do not believe that either renter involved in the Las Vegas and New Orleans attacks had a criminal background that would have identified them as a security threat.”
Renting through Turo in the United States requires that the driver be at least 18 years old, have a driver’s license and pass the company’s approval process. “In most cases, you’ll get approved immediately,” the website says. Some vehicle owners — “hosts,” Turo calls them — set a higher age threshold.
The rental interface is similar to Airbnb’s, allowing users to browse available vehicles by city and see previous users’ ratings of cars and hosts.
The platform, which bills itself as “the world’s largest car-sharing marketplace,” started in 2009 under the name RelayRides. It moved its headquarters to San Francisco in 2010 and rebranded as Turo in 2015.
The venture-backed company filed paperwork in 2022 to go public but it has not yet made its initial public offering. A TechCrunch report in March said Turo’s growth had “decelerated in recent years.” In the third quarter of 2023, Turo’s updated filing said there were about 350,000 vehicle listings on its platform, up 16% from a year earlier, TechCrunch said.
Its CEO since 2011, Andre Haddad, was previously with eBay, which acquired an online marketplace he co-founded.
The owner of the Ford F-150 Lightning used in the New Orleans attack told the New York Times that he recognized the truck when he saw news video that showed its license plate. He said he had been renting out five cars through Turo but that he now does not plan to use the platform again.