Nobody Seems to Know Why This Turo Porsche Cayman Disappeared Off the Street
Was it repo’d, towed away, or abducted by aliens? No one seems to know—but it wasn’t technically stolen.
As car stories go, there aren't that many that would fall under the mystery genre. Action and adventure? We get tons of that. True crime? Happens more often than we'd like. Science fiction? You bet. But, on the car-related whole, it's not every day something strange happens and just goes eerily unexplained. Well, brought to us by Houston-based automotive photographer Kevin McCauley is a mysterious tale involving Turo, a disappearing Cayman, and many unanswered questions.
It all happened during Luftgekühlt back in 2016, an air-cooled Porsche show in downtown Los Angeles. McCauley was covering the event for Road & Track and decided to rent a base 2008 Porsche Cayman off of Turo to get around for the weekend. In case you're unaware, Turo is a service that lets car owners rent their personal vehicles out to people, sort of like the automotive equivalent of Airbnb. Similar to career Airbnb hoteliers, a good number of enterprising Turo users have amassed a fleet of vehicles for the express purpose of renting them out.
McCauley rented the Cayman, got picked up at the airport by a man named "Valentino" (who is notably not the same person registered as the car's owner on Turo), and street-parked it overnight outside of his Airbnb in Venice. Lo and behold, it was gone the next morning. After much shock, Kevin texted the bad news to Valentino, who called back later that day to tell the photographer that things were fine, "these things happen," and that he wanted the Porsche's key back.
Kevin's story is thoroughly documented in this YouTube video and is definitely worth hearing in full but the long and the short of it is that the car was accounted for, not stolen, but was locked away somewhere for largely unknown, proprietary reasons. A satisfying conclusion, we know.
From a Turo Support email to McCauley, "The police did not recover the vehicle, but they were kind enough to inform me that the vehicle was safe/accounted for in storage. They confirmed that the vehicle had not been stolen, but that it had been stored for unknown reasons, most likely municipal."
In the end, McCauley had his Turo trip refunded and even received a $100 credit for his trouble. However, the mystery of why the black Cayman seemingly vanished off the street overnight remains mostly a mystery. Was it repo'd by creditors? Hooked away for racking up too many parking tickets by inconsiderate renters? Was something truly fishy going on with this "Valentino" character? Or perhaps it was beamed up by aliens involved in an intergalactic Porsche-trafficking conspiracy.
If anyone out there happens to know this car, its owner, or what happened to it that night (or if you're a Turo expert with theories), we'd love to hear from you.
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