Chicago Business – Your neighbor isn’t a business
There are benefits to being a traditional car-rental company that platforms like Turo don’t have. Traditional car-rental companies get all of what they charge for renting a vehicle. On Turo, the bulk of the money goes to the car owner and the platform only gets a small portion of the fee. Traditional car-rental companies get millions in tax subsidies, grants and federal bailouts. Individual car owners don’t. In fact, NetChoice estimates that rental companies avoid paying $3.2 billion annually in state sales taxes, while Turo estimates that its hosts have paid over $455 million in state sales taxes when they purchased their personal vehicles.