Daimler is putting even more money into mobility, jointly leading a $92 million Series D round for Turo, a peer-to-peer car sharing platform.
San Francisco-based Turo, which was formerly known as RelayRides, has now raised a total of $193 million.
Car-sharing is as much a socio-economic phenomenon as a travel product, but Turo's messaging is very much around the car being part of the journey - "a Tesla for a luxurious weekend away, or a classic Mercedes-Benz for a picture-perfect road trip." Its website has a channel dedicated to travelogues.
Currently, Turo has over four million users and has over 170,000 cars available.
Daimler's co-lead in the round is South Korean conglomerate SK Holdings. Its other car-sharing investments include SoCar Korea and soon-to-be-launched SoCar Malaysia. Its CEO, Dong Hyun Jang "is looking forward to helping Turo to expand into Asia."
Meanwhile, the announcement also says that Turo has bought Daimler's own peer-to-peer car sharing platform Croove, the market leader in Germany. Turo said this "provides an immediate opportunity to expand [our] presence from existing international markets in Canada and the UK to Germany and more broadly into Europe.
Peer-to-peer car sharing is often described in Airbnb terms, but the impact is much broader and immediate. People - even Millennials - will not stop buying or renting homes because there is a platform which allows them to stay at someone else's property (although there are isolated examples of people "living"in Airbnbs).
With cars, it is a different matter. A study earlier this year from Cap Gemini, which covered 8,000 consumers in Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, UK and USA, found that one-in-three think "mobility services are an alternative to buying a car".
Related reading from tnooz:
Daimler brings Via’s on-demand ride-share to Europe with $50 million JV (Sept17)