RelayRides rebrands as Turo and raises $47m
Yesterday, RelayRides, the San Francisco-based car sharing service, announced that it was rebranding as Turo, and has raised $47m in Series C funding led by Kleiner Perkins. Turo has not disclosed the number of people using its platform or the number of cars currently available to renters. However, the company states that 60% of its revenue now comes from out-of-town travellers renting cars that belong to people who are away at the time, leaving their unused vehicle to make some extra money. The company wants to take this trend global, hence the name, which CEO Andre Haddad says evokes “touring,” or, in Italian, “turismo.”

So as of today, RelayRides is no more. Its new name is Turo, a name that is meant to evoke speed and adventure—think “Turbo” and “Gran Turismo.” It’s a word that fits snugly into the corporate Esperanto spoken by global tech companies. It’s sleek and fun, as is the company’s new logo, a simple clean outline of an arrow, connoting the road ahead.

A Difficult Trade-Off

Companies don’t change their names very frequently. In doing so, they’re sloughing off much of the brand recognition and affinity they’ve spent years to build. Generally speaking, if a firm is changing its name, it’s usually because it has taken on some unseemly association that it is desperate to rid itself of. (Altria, anyone?) Netflix announced its intentions to de-emphasize its DVD-by-mail arm by changing its name to Quikster, and repurposing the original name—and its branding—for its streaming service.

RelayRides, on the other hand, wasn’t trying to run away from anything. To the contrary, it had built a solid-if-relatively-modest business, and some enthusiastic customers. Haddad calls the decision to risk all that in exchange for larger potential growth “fun and scary at once.” And once he made the call, the company had to move fast. The longer it waited, and the bigger the company got before it made the switch, the harder it would be.

Its new catchphrase positions the company as a super-fun rental-car company, not an economy-toppling breakthrough model of person-to-person commerce.

For the past six months, the RelayRides team has reached out to customers, investors, and to founder Clark himself. It hired a design studio (the aptly named DesignStudio) and even a naming studio—Lexicon, the same firm that coined Blackberry and the Swiffer. It identified its key attributes, drew up competitive matrices to identify their unique selling proposition, came up with a “brand purpose”, and found a set of typefaces—including a counterintuitive all-caps serif font—to help set it apart.

But what’s most striking is what the new brand doesn’t say. RelayRides foregrounded process, the innovative new model for sharing privately-owned cars. Turo, on the other hand, emphasizes the driving experience. Its marketing underscores the diversity of its fleet, the idea that your rental car needn’t just be a functional commodity but can be a source of pleasure and personalization. A new blog will let renters share their experiences; DesignStudio’s Peter McClelland has contributed a piece about renting his Tesla-obsessed father a Model S for his birthday. Its new catchphrase—“Rent the car; own the adventure”—positions the company as a super-fun rental-car company, not an economy-toppling breakthrough model of person-to-person commerce.

“If you think about the old logo and the old name, the primary focus is sharing,” McClelland says. “But that’s not the primary reason why people enjoy using us. They like the stories, the travel, the ability to rent a specific car.”

Sharing Is Assumed

It’s a sign of just how comfortable we’ve become with the idea of person-to-person commerce. When I wrote about the sharing economy a couple of years ago, a Lyft driver told me she’d never rent out her car on RelayRides. “What I’d wonder is, what are they doing with my car?” she said. Lots of people had similar concerns about renting a room on Airbnb or hopping into a stranger’s Uber. This was the biggest question facing the nascent sharing economy, whether these companies could make us just as comfortable inhabiting the homes and cars of random individuals as we are renting rooms from Marriott or cars from Avis.

You still hear the occasional horror story, but by and large, the terms of the debate have evolved. We now worry about Airbnb’s effect on real-estate markets, or whether Uber has undue influence over local governments. Those are higher-order problems, questions that established businesses face, not issues for startups still trying to convince its customers to trust one another. With this rebranding, Turo is providing us with further proof that the sharing-economy model has become part of the fabric of our lives. It’s not even worth talking about it.