kfsgo

Turo is a great idea up until the point where something goes wrong, at which point you will be cast into the ninth circle of insurance hell. Don't touch them with a ten foot pole, and really in general principle just do never any kind of gig economy bullshit. If you want the good rentals (for not truly stupid money) the ideal is to go for one of the companies that lets you pick anything off the lot. Still no guarantees, but odds aren't bad - there's no guarantee you will get an Good car, but you can almost always avoid the really grim ones. National are traditionally the big one, I think Hertz do it at some airports these days also. Usually some ferreting will produce a code of some sort to turn a new account into a super duper platinum balls account in which case they will usually dig something at least slightly interesting out if the lot is looking sad. (Proof provided from back in July that National at Pearson do give these out...though puttering around Mississauga for a couple of days wasn't exactly the best environment for it)

Sort of cheating, but also not cheating, with this picture of a Morris Ital in Portugal from the Wikipedia article, in that I'm probably the only person on the planet who will ever look at it and think, 'hey, I know where that is'...and this is probably the only place on the internet where anyone will ever find that even the tiniest bit amusing. So you get to look at it and be amused. Ish. Specifically, here in Lagoa: https://goo.gl/maps/BSx1qRLiDSucTmva6 Long since pedestrianised, back in I want to say 1995 at which time I was living across the road. Not really many Itals around by then, alas.

...and, for something different, the non-euro side: 1999 Chevrolet Malibu LS (2017): 3.1L V6 which made about 120hp by the time I got to it. Pushing the go pedal down resulted in a loud mooing noise and no appreciable change in speed. People razz on American cars but I was pretty much sold on the concept, even if this wasn't a very good example. Fairly quiet, fairly smooth, only intermittently exhibited weird electrical behaviour. Convenience provided by being the colour of road dirt is exceptional in northern BC in spring. Capable of powersliding up the side of a 12ft deep snow-filled ditch in extremis. Had worn out shocks which I never replaced, which somehow resulted in it riding better on bad roads than good ones. 100kph on smooth pavement was intolerable; 130 on rough Yukon chipseal was fine. Fine as long as you kept it under 90, which is often the speed limit up here anyway. Unfortunately at this point in history GM seem to have been engineering for rear seat room as the front legroom was terrible for the size of the thing; after a couple of hours you had to get out and go for a walk. Objectively it was a heap of shit, but took me thousands of miles through some of the least densely populated places on earth and only ever broke down within walking distance of a parts store, so it gets points for being good-natured. 2012 Chevrolet Impala LS (2019): Essentially the above concept but less crap. 3.6L V6 making about 300hp. Fast in a straight line. Trying to go around corners too hard would cause the wheels to try and roll the tire sidewalls over. All the jokes about landbarges were written for a class of car that thing was just about the last representative of. Attention shifted from rear legroom to front; lots of space for the driver but the seat was so thick and padded that you'd probably have more room in the back of an old Corsa. Mouse-fur velour seats mean that in a dry climate like the BC interior you get zapped, hard, every time you get out. Some incomprehensible bits of cost-cutting like the lack of a folding rear seat meant that it was relegated to cargo trailer duty for a move and supplanted by... 2001 GMC Yukon XL (2021): This is the Suburban with a different badge. Big boat. Not fast, and rather rolly, but solid and reassuring, like driving a particularly giant sofa. Except for the aesthetic qualities of the interior it could have rolled out of the factory the day before I bought it. Returned 15mpg at any speed, whether unloaded or towing its own weight. I regret selling it but I felt guilty beating it to death on bush roads. 2022 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 (2022): Current chariot. Essentially a hybrid of the Impala and the Suburban with the engine and fuel consumption of the former and the carrying capacity of the latter, more or less. Just high tech enough to be convenient without being annoying. This is the poser offroad version with magic racing shocks, mechanical diff lockers etc, which I'm probably one of 1% of owners that ever get any practical use out of. Drives like an old hydraulic Citroen as a result, corners flat, ignores bumps and will happily cruise down broken-down forest service roads at triple digit speeds, which I do on a regular basis and haven't killed it...yet.

In order of driving on the euro side... 1999 Volvo S40 Bi-Fuel (2015): Hard to say as it came pre-broken; hitting the brakes too hard would stop the engine which was a startling thing to discover coming up to a roundabout. Exited stage flatbed three days later for a total loss of about £15. 1997 Skoda Felicia 1.3 GLi (2016): Great fun, like driving a go-kart. More interior space than it should have had. Had a sense of humour; the radio caught fire next to a fire station. Fording depth was considerable. Loud and leaky and grumbly, used more fuel than my current means of transport (at 2/5ths the weight, 1/3 the engine displacement), rattled the gear shifter about like it was trying to tell you off and if you got too close to the sunroof you'd get a bath every time it rained. I never fixed a single one of the endless number of problems it came with and none of them ever really got any worse or mattered very much apart from the magic smoke coming out of the noise box, though it was dissolving into a flat burgundy-coloured puddle by the time it left. Seven years on I still kinda miss it. 2015? VW Up! basic generic rental car spec (2022): An Car without much to obviously recommend it except that seven years and 90,000km into being a rental car it was still essentially as new. Sounded great when pushed hard enough. Had for two months in Portugal, ideal little micro thing for old villages designed at donkey scale. After driving not-euro cars for five years felt very gutless, but that's more about me...

And here's me with a mere one parking spot...

Hey, look on the bright side...at least your spares aren't £600 a corner!

Lucky someone if it goes for that - anything with the 7.3 over here is highly desirable (by reputation more than reality these days as they're all ancient) to the point that it'd probably be worth shipping it to a different continent again...

As I understand it the real money is in selling the same car several times.

The annoying part of it is that you 'have' to take them somewhat seriously because enough people move from there to here for work for a while. Then you get 20 minutes in and it turns out buddy was just hitting the booze a bit too hard last night and thought the house it was outside looked like auntie Doris's down the way. Thing eventually sold with no drama to someone the next town over who messaged about it half an hour after the ad was up and then disappeared for three months. Definitely less idiots out in the middle of nowhere, but things take even longer to happen...

It's no better in the land where the distances go up a digit. I sold an old Suburban last year and had people in Nova Scotia messaging me about it. That is: