Owning a car in the U.S. can be a serious squeeze on your wallet—and that’s only getting worse.
Monthly payments have been climbing, high interest rates have become the norm, and the average transaction price for new vehicles has continued to soar, with buyers taking longer-term loans to pay for them. With the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles now gone, battery-powered cars aren’t easing the pressure on the broader market either.
Car-sharing platform Turo thinks it has a solution for this growing affordability problem. It has introduced long-term rentals lasting up to a year.
The idea is simple: Customers can rent a car for a month, three months, or any period up to a year without any long-term commitments, down payments, depreciation worries, or maintenance costs. Since they’re renting, not owning, none of those hassles really apply.
Photo by: Turo
“The traditional models of accessing a vehicle through financing or leasing are long-term commitments; it means that you are beholden to loan repayments, and maybe a credit check,” Tim Rossanis, Turo’s Senior Vice President, U.S., told InsideEVs in an interview. “What we’re putting into the market is really focused on providing Americans with flexible access to vehicles.”
According to car research firm Edmunds, the number of buyers taking on monthly payments over $1,000 is hovering near record highs, making up nearly one-fifth of all new vehicle purchases. More than one in five car loans now stretch seven years or longer, with the average loan amount climbing to nearly $43,000 in the third quarter of 2025.
Turo said its long-term rentals will make driving more flexible for customers and provide steady revenue streams for owners renting their vehicles out. If customers rent for a month, the pricing is similar to your regular daily or weekend car rentals on platforms such as Hertz and Enterprise. They pay a sum up front, which includes the cost of renting the vehicle, plus Turo’s Standard insurance and taxes.
If customers rent for longer than one month, they pay in monthly installments. But they still retain the ability to make changes to their booking, like shortening or extending the rental. If owners have vehicles lying idle for long durations, renting them out makes sure the vehicle is running and they’re earning revenue from that.
Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
Turo claims that at the end of last year, it had about 3.5 million active guests on its platform globally. It also had 140,000 hosts who were renting out 340,000 vehicles across 1,600 vehicle makes and models. Rossanis said internal research was already showing trends of longer-term rentals, with a growing share of younger customers, especially in the Gen Z and Millennials categories, looking for flexible options to rent vehicles.
The downside to Turo’s long-term rental program is ironically also the cost. Monthly payments can range from $600 to over $1,000, depending on the car and the region. That’s slightly higher than the average new-vehicle finance payment of $754 in the third quarter, according to Edmunds. And unlike a car loan, those payments don’t lead to ownership. The vehicle eventually has to go back.
In an extremely car-dependent America, that’s possibly a dealbreaker for many, unless you live in a big city like New York or Chicago, where public transit actually works. It can also be tricky to find a vehicle with unlimited mileage for the rental period, and costs can rise quickly if you go over the limit. In other words, you’ll need to predict your driving needs and plan accordingly.
Photo by: Cadillac
But Turo isn’t the first to experiment with longer-term car rentals. Several automakers and rental companies have tried similar programs, often ending up with mixed results.
Cadillac launched a $1,800-per-month subscription service called Book by Cadillac, but shut it down in 2018, just two years after its introduction, due to back-end technology issues and high operating costs, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
Similarly, the Access by BMW program, which started at around $2,000 a month, offered flexible access to luxury models but ended in 2021. The Care by Volvo program, which was also a low-commitment alternative to leasing, also ended in 2024.
Traditional rental giants like Hertz and Budget still offer monthly rentals, though it’s unclear how popular those programs actually are. The monthly rental costs swing wildly for these, from anywhere in the low $1,000 range to over $3,000 in some cases, depending on the vehicle and region.
Still, Rossanis believes Turo has an advantage. The company doesn’t need to raise massive amounts of capital or chase profitability from scratch. It already has a vast network of hosts, people who now have an incentive to rent out their cars with less hassle. Instead of managing four $250 trips a month, a host can opt for one $1,000 monthly rental. That also means fewer pickups and drop-offs (if customers choose delivery) and only one cleaning instead of four.
And unlike the failed subscription programs of the past, Turo’s pricing looks more competitive, if not exactly cheap. In the Jersey City ZIP code, for instance, a 2016 Hyundai Tucson rents for about $700 a month, including taxes and insurance. A 2024 Tesla Model Y or BMW X3 run closer to $1,000. Not exactly a steal, but still cheaper than the Cadillac and BMW subscription programs ever were.
“We encourage our hosts to list the car that they already have, the cars that are sitting idle 95% of the time,” Rossanis said. Putting those vehicles back onto the road benefits both sides, he said. Customers get access when they need a car for a longer duration, and owners earn extra income.
The goal isn’t to add more cars on the road, but to make the most of the ones already out there. “Our mission is to put the world’s one and a half billion cars to better use,” he added.
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