# Finding the optimal car to list on RelayRides

Combining the RelayRides data with the Edmunds API and doing some simple math gave me the answer I was looking for - a 2008 Toyota Prius. There were a few cars that had a better expected return but they also had very few trips taken and weren’t listed for long which leads me to believe that their return won’t last. For the most part, the rental rate ends up being highly correlated with the price of the car - the most expensive in my dataset was a 2011 Mercedes G-Class which is listed at a $550/day and has an estimated cost of$80k while the cheapest was a 2003 Ford Taurus that’s listed at $32/day and has an estimated cost of$4k. In general, the market seems pretty balanced in terms of price but there’s a wide variance in how often different cars get rented out - it’s clearly proportional to price but there’s definitely something else there. Unfortunately, this approach only lets us examine the cars that are actually listed and won’t let us predict how a random car would do. In the future I might take a stab at running a regression to generalize this approach but the challenge will be in figuring out the relevant factors.