Turo Rent Better Cars

Enjoyed using Turo up until recently. Have always had nice hosts — it’s the company itself which is the issue here. Listen closely: Turo does not seem to give a flying f* about its customers. A couple of weeks ago, my and I were heading back into the city after visiting the countryside for my birthday when the car we were in ended up breaking down. Fine, not the end of the world. We message our host, who is apologetic but says legally Turo’s third party roadside support has to help us. Cue a confusing, frustrating, and quite frankly dangerous series of terrible communications and awful service. We talk to the third party company that is supposed to come 1. Try to fix the car and, if that fails, 2. Pick us up and get us home. We are stuck of the side of an extremely busy motorway, an hour outside of London’s with no way to get home. We’re a reasonable/understanding bunch but we’re all hoping it can be sorted reasonably quickly. Nope. Issues galore: 1. Waiting time? 4+ hours, and no promises. Sorry, they are “jam packed this evening”. Bearing in mind, it was 8 pm in the winter in England, the temperature around 2 degrees. 2. We call our host back, who says he can send a friend out to help us but can only take two out of the four of us home. Our host urged us to call someone or a taxi to take us home, as he had someone hire a car who got a flat tire in the snow. Waiting time for Turo roadside support? Eight hours. A single woman alone. 3. At this point, a motorway patrol officer, in one of those huge trucks that you can put cars on, pulls over behind us. We thought he’d be able to help. He lets us know it’ll be £150 to tow us... but only to the off ramp 50 metres or so away. He also tells us if we decide not to do that (which we don’t, because we didn’t feel like spending £150 just to still be broken down a couple of metres down the road), we need to sit on the field next to the motorway. That he “saw a couple fly through their windshield when a truck veered off onto the shoulder slightly just last week”. Great. It’s 1 degrees. He gives us foil blanket to help us keep warm and bids us farewell. So, we consider whether we’d like to stay in the car, warmer, though risk being crashed into in the misty night, or safer, on the field, but pretty cold, since it was around 0 degrees now. My friend had recently had bronchitis, too, so his chest was not feeling great. Our shoes were soaked through. It was very dark. Time ticked on. No sign of Turo roadside support. It’s 11 pm now, and we all have to get up to work in the morning. 4. We call Turo back. They shrug and say there isn’t anything else they can do. 6. We talk to our host again. His friend is an hour away but he is coming. How will 2 out of 4 of us get home? Who knows. A taxi is £160+. 7. Talk to Turo/roadside assistance again. They can’t tell us how long they will be but it shouldn’t be too long. 8. Eventually, when it’s past 12 am, we cannot wait anymore. We call our host, he says to just leave the car there with keys in the ignition. If we’d known we could leave the car, we would’ve decided to bite the bullet and call a taxi sooner. So, we call a taxi, and almost £200 + an hour later, we’re home. Turo roadside support wasn’t any closer to getting to us, as far as we knew. Turo’s response? No apology, no explanation, just £50 that we had to email back and forth for. I have pushed back as I believe they ought to reimburse us for our entire taxi fare. We spent over four hours in the freezing cold on the side of a dangerous motorway in a field. Hungry. What if if had been me, a 25-year-old woman, alone? What if it had been even colder? What if all our phones had died? What if we’d been further away from home? Turo have refused to pay us back, stating that they have held up their end of the deal. My response is, your end of the deal promises roadside assistance, which was non-existent for us. We ended up wasting our time and money.