Turo CEO Andre Haddad: Very excited about the state of EV demand

Street's been really looking for case studies to explain where the EV adoption curve is right now, and one of the most vivid ones lately at least has been Hertz and their disposition of electric vehicles. Do you think that there is some resistance that we're not accounting for? You know, we are very excited about the state of EV demand. As far as we can tell at Turo, it's been growing much faster than the rest of the platform. You know, we've got pretty much all kinds of cars on tour. As you know, we've got over 1500 makes and models from combustion engine vehicles to hybrids to EVs, but we continue to see EVs gaining penetration on our platform. So we're very excited about the future of EVs. We just got some registration or new car figures out of Europe for example for the last month. I mean EVs are down double digits Is do you think it's about waiting for cheaper models or a wider assortment of models or something about the charging network or range anxiety? I think there will be ups and downs, you know, when you think about the numbers on a monthly or quarterly basis. But the long term trend I think is pretty clear given where we're going from an emissions standpoint. I think we're going to have to move forward with more hybrids and more EVs and frankly the technology is evolving really rapidly and I think the next step is more affordable EVs. I think the limitation of our current EV offering that we see on the marketplace is that it's still quite pricey. And so you've got a lot of early adopters, you've got a kind of part of the market that can afford to buy one or rent one. And I think the next step is more affordable EVs that will be more mass market for all. What is the typical consumer for your service looking for? What's the use case? Is it just the same as it would be for a regular car rental or is there some other element of it that would lead them to, to look at at your platform? Well, you know, we're reinventing the car rental experience. As you know, we've been at it for a few years. We've had tremendous performance over the last few years. Our business has grown by over 400% over the last three years. In the context of a lot of disruption, you know, you mentioned the emergency VVS, there was the pandemic, Obviously there's a lot of disruption in travel and transportation, but we're very pleased with the performance of our business and we have a lot of use cases. Yes, there's the traditional, I'd say airport rental use case, but there's a lot more. We see people in particular using Turo as a place for them to test drive cars before they buy them. And that's been one of the big drivers of our EV demand. We see a lot of people going to Turo booking an EV for a weekend or a few days to try to see if that vehicle with all of its new technology is actually a good fit for them. But we also see a lot of people using Turo as car enthusiasts. You know, we're actually just announcing this week that we're bringing a revolutionary new way to search for vehicles on tour where instead of entering kind of a destination at a date, which is the traditional rental experience, you can actually start your search by specifying a particular brand, particular make or model, and we'll show you everything that's available. So if you want to rent that cyber truck, you want to rent that Rivian that you were talking about earlier, we can actually show you all the Rivians and all the cyber trucks are available on Turo. More specificity, given that your business has grown 400% over the past few years. You say you're pleased with the performance of the business, yet you've been on file to go public. You've got an S1 out there for a few years now. What is still keeping you on the sidelines? We, we are excited about going public at the in the right conditions. You know the last few years as you know have been pretty challenging for the IPO markets. So we're just waiting for the market conditions to become more favorable and we're ready. Finally, I wonder you know, all this talk about robo taxi and and mobility that way MO and crews continue to chip away at that picture. What do you think that does to the long term model of just car ownership in general? Do you think Americans are going to always want to have their own ride or or can we envision a day, one day where they simply don't? You know, we believe very strongly that car ownership is here to stay. Obviously, all of these great technologies will be included and the vehicles that people will buy in the future. Look at what's happening with Mercedes, with Tesla, with others that are bringing self driving or some level of self driving to their vehicles. But we think the love affair of Americans with cars is not going to be ending because there's autonomous vehicle technology that's going to be available.