Turo rental SUV broke down, leaving Charlotte man with $800 tow bill

CHARLOTTE — Ross Cody said he’s a “big fan of Turo. I love the convenience of it.”

Turo is like Lyft or Uber for rental cars. “Anyone can put their car up. So rather than getting your standard brand-new Civic or Toyota Corolla, you can get anything that somebody owns,” Cody explained.

Cody says he did just that: rented someone’s SUV for a business trip to Raleigh.

He told Action 9 attorney Jason Stoogenke he made it there, but then “everything shut down. So power steering, no power steering... Fortunately, I was able to get over four lanes of traffic. There’s an exit ramp. And I was able to come to a complete stop.”

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He said, thankfully, he ended up near a tow business. He’s the kind of person who tries to solve his own problems, and he had an idea: see if they’d tow the SUV back to the Charlotte area and give him a ride as well.

Cody said they agreed on about $800. He said he told Turo he’d even front the money if they’d pay him back. He said Turo then said yes.

Cody said Turo reimbursed about half, but weeks passed, and he was worried he’d never see the other half.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” he said. “I just simply wanted the $800 that I had shelled out on their behalf.”

That’s when he emailed Action 9. “I’ve been following you for years. Probably about a decade now. It’s always funny when we encounter a situation in life we kind of joke about, ‘This seems like a Stoogenke situation. Stoogenke needs to know about this to fix this,” he said. “I thought we needed Stoogenke truly on this case.”

Action 9 emailed Turo, and about five hours later, Cody emailed that it worked. The company paid him the remaining $446.

“I feel like it’s just a weight off my shoulders,” he said.

Turo emailed Action 9, “Thank you for reaching out and raising this to our attention. We located the caller’s information and were able to remedy the situation today for them by completing the full refund, which was delayed due to an isolated PayPal transfer issue, but it’s since been resolved!”

The company didn’t explain what the “isolated PayPal transfer issue” was, and Cody said he’s not really sure what that’s all about either.

He will be the first to tell you not to offer to help. Sure, it sounds bad, but let the rental company solve the problem their way, even if you have a good solution.

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