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So, pretty similar, although the CR-V is a 2016 model the Qashqai is, presumably, a 2019. I checked out a local car-rental outfit, and they had a similar-sized SUV, a Nissan Qashqai, for $64 a day. On TURO’s website, I found a 2016 Honda CR-V, one of about a dozen TURO cars available in my home town area, for $68 a day. How do the rates compare with conventional car rentals? You don’t want the cops to come looking for your vehicle, which they saw as the getaway car in the surveillance video of some bank robbery. They also vet anyone interested in renting a vehicle. The car then becomes available for “rent” on the company’s website. They verify that the ownership is all in order, ensure the vehicle is in good mechanical condition and arrange liability and collision insurance. TURO gives its customers the chance to monetize this unused asset. These cars all cost their owners huge amounts of money even when they’re just sitting there: buy or lease payments, parking, maintenance and, of course, the biggest of them all, depreciation. Virtually all of them, save perhaps airport limos, are massively underutilized. Haddad points out there are some 30 million cars in Canada, 300 million in the U.S. He previously worked at eBay, and understood perhaps better than most how internet-based businesses function. I spoke with TURO’s CEO, Andre Haddad, recently in the company’s Toronto office. (Apparently this investigation didn’t turn up the name of a similar-sounding town in Nova Scotia). The company expanded rapidly, took on new management, and changed its name to TURO - a word they researched carefully to make sure it didn’t mean “cockroach” in some Bulgarian dialect. He came up with an internet-based platform for cars that works very much like Airbnb, but actually predated it by a couple of years. But he noticed all the cars parked out on the street, going nowhere. He couldn’t find a Zipcar or a conventional rental agency that had a car available. The “founding story” goes that he was in town one snowy winter evening, and while he normally would have walked or taken his bike, it was too cold.

This idea occurred to Shelby Clark when he was a student at the Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Mass., in the late 2000s. Maybe somebody needs a car just like yours while it is just sitting there, depreciating by the minute? Most people’s wheels sit in a garage or driveway all night, and in some parking lot most of the day. Now, what other underused asset do many people have that they might be able to monetize? Who knew you could make money by renting out extra rooms in your house? Airbnb has been one of the more surprising successes of the internet age.