If you own a vehicle you can actually make money by renting it to others. With unlimited availability of rental times, you can potentially earn $500 – $1,000 per month per car. This doesn’t include costs that you may incur to run this business, so profits will be less.
This kind of side hustle won’t provide a full-time income unless you end up buying a fleet of rental vehicles. However, it can be an excellent way to make a bit of spare cash or even pay for your car entirely by letting others rent it when you don’t need it.
Why Rent Your Vehicle?
In many parts of the USA, it is almost a necessity to own a car, truck, van, motorcycle or any kind of motorized vehicle. However, there can be a lot of downtime where it just sits in your driveway or garage. Instead of letting it collect dust, you can lease it to other people to use whenever you don’t need it.
If you’re already working at home running an online business or side hustle, your car may even go unused 5 or 6 days each week. For couples that live together or are married, you may have more than one vehicle, and one of them may sit around not getting used most days. Either situation would be an ideal opportunity to rent it out for spare cash when you’re not using it.
By renting a car 5 days a week, you could potentially make it pay for itself. This can really help out a struggling budget that is strapped for extra cash each month. When your vehicle is already paid off, you’ll have fairly minimal expenses and get to pocket most of your earnings as profits.
Insurance & Liability Issues
Overall, you’re going to need some money to start this side hustle. You’ll need a car tracker to be able to locate your vehicle to be eligible, but there are other requirements you should look into before starting. In particular, make sure you check with your insurance company to see if a change is needed with your coverage to be able to cover damages if one of your customers is in a wreck in your car.
The GPS tracker is required by sites that connect you with clients. This allows you or your insurance to track down the car in case the customer doesn’t return it after their lease period has expired. It’s a safety measure that can reduce bills too, so make sure you mention to your insurance that you’ll have this device in place.
Turo
Turo seems to be a better site to use in many ways. It looks like they allow free listings, although I haven’t personally used this site to confirm.
It appears as though Turo makes it money from taking 10% – 30% of your rental fees that you earn. The exact amount depends on the level of protection you choose for your vehicle to protect against loss or damage. Be sure to explore these options with your insurance carrier. You may be able to get cheaper coverage with your insurance and use minimal coverage on this website to earn the larger share of your billings.
GetAround
Getaround charges an upfront cost of $100 per vehicle to list it for rent plus another $20 per month. They likely make all or most of their revenue from those subscription fees, but they may also take a portion of each sale too.
For anyone that only wants to use one website, Turo may be the best option. However, if you find that you’re not able to rent your car for all of the days you have it available, you could consider using both sites to maximize your client base. The upfront and ongoing expense of this site does make it much less appealing to try though. Even if your vehicle goes unrented for one day each week, it may not be worth it to you to fill that time slot by paying this site.
Rental Fleet Business
Since it’s possible to make more each month than it costs to buy a car, even with monthly financing, you could potentially build a business on these sites with a rental fleet. Someone with good credit and enough down payment money could potentially purchase numerous cars, trucks and SUVs at once. Since they won’t be for personal use, you’d be able to list them for rent 7 days a week.
Others already do this business and seem to be successful, but I do not have personal experience with it to give you more in-depth tips or an insight into the financials of this kind of business. However, the numbers seem to check out with plenty of profit leftover, and that’s using financing payments to buy the vehicles too. Someone with upfront cash could make an even larger profit long-term.
To really turn this into a full-time income, you would likely need a fleet of at least 10 cars and possibly more than that depending on the exact monthly profit from each and the amount of your monthly bills. Even if you don’t decide to turn this into a full business, it’s still a great side hustle that can let you can extra cash with minimal work using something that you already pay to use for yourself. It’s kind of hard to beat a deal like that.