This week in car rental & carsharing

Verra Mobility just learned what happens when half your revenue walks out the door. Avis Budget decided to end their contract, and the stock dropped 46% before most people finished their coffee. Verra does tolling and photo enforcement for fleets — basically the back-office stuff that makes rental car violations profitable.

The breakup starts in September, which gives everyone time to watch the slow-motion unraveling. Betting your business on one massive customer works great until it doesn't.

The Netherlands just decided to fix corporate fleet electrification with a hammer. Starting next year, any company leasing a gas or hybrid vehicle gets slapped with a monthly fee equal to one percent of the car's list price. That's €350 per month for a €35,000 car, and employers can't pass it along to employees.

The math is pretty blunt — keep ordering combustion engines and watch your fleet budget implode, or go electric and dodge the penalty entirely. No middle ground, no gentle nudging. Corporate fleet managers are suddenly doing very different calculations about what counts as "affordable" company transportation.

Waymo's rolling out these spacious new Zeekr vans as their next robotaxi generation, complete with three screens and braille-friendly handles. They're calling them "Ojai" and promising better weather performance, which is interesting timing since they just had to suspend service in six cities because the cars couldn't handle flooded roads.

Half a million weekly paid rides across eleven cities sounds impressive until you remember they've been at this for over a decade. The real test isn't the fancy interior or the elevator doors — it's whether these things can actually drive themselves reliably when it's not warm and sunny in Phoenix.

John Healy spent sixteen years watching rental car companies and showed up at their big trade show to tell them the second half of 2026 might suck. Inflation's back, gas hit five bucks in the Midwest, and airlines are already talking about cutting flights while jacking up fares. His advice? Keep your fleets small and disciplined instead of buying everything in sight.

The rental business runs on three levers — how many cars you own, how often people rent them, and what you charge. Turns out you can only really control the first one. People will travel when they want to travel, but at least you can avoid drowning in idle inventory when they don't.

Car sharing clubs are having a moment, apparently. New data shows they're actually working — people joining, using cars, not immediately abandoning the concept when they realize parking still exists. The trick seems to be keeping it local and boring instead of trying to revolutionize urban mobility with an app. Turns out shared Honda Civics parked on regular streets beat venture-funded smart pods that need special infrastructure. Who could have predicted that making things simple would work better than making things clever.

Avis just had an earnings beat and the stock jumped 10%, which sounds great until you remember this is the same company that's been promising to reinvent itself every quarter for the past few years. The "service ecosystem overhaul" is corporate speak for finally fixing their app and maybe answering the phone when someone's rental breaks down.

Stock analysts love a turnaround story, but rental car companies don't really transform — they just get better or worse at having cars where people need them. The real test isn't whether they can beat low expectations one quarter, it's whether they can keep cars on lots when travel actually picks up.

Avis Budget just announced they're issuing another $300 million in senior notes at 8% interest, which is a polite way of saying they need cash and are willing to pay handsomely for it. They're using the money to pay down some older debt that carries a lower rate, which sounds backwards until you realize the older bonds probably come due sooner and they'd rather kick that problem down the road.

Eight percent is what you pay when banks aren't exactly lining up to hand you money on better terms. The rental car business has been a wild ride since 2020, and apparently the market still thinks lending to fleet operators requires a nice cushion.

UTA Edenred just rolled out subscription deals for Ionity charging, promising fleet managers one card for everything and bulk pricing that actually makes sense. The math looks decent — drop from sixty-something cents per kWh down to the thirties if you pay the monthly fee and use it enough.

The thing is, fleet electrification keeps hitting the same wall: drivers still need to remember which card works where, apps crash when you need them, and somebody always ends up stranded at the one charger that's broken. One card to rule them all sounds great until you're the person standing in the rain wondering why the payment terminal won't wake up.

Southwest just ditched their homegrown car rental booking system for CarTrawler's off-the-shelf platform. The press release talks about "dynamic retail-led solutions" and "deeper loyalty engagement," which translates to: their old system wasn't making enough money from the upsell.

CarTrawler's basically become the white-label rental backend for airlines who realized building their own booking tech is expensive and pointless. Southwest joins American, Alaska, and a bunch of others who decided outsourcing the car rental headache was smarter than pretending they're software companies. The loyalty points angle is nice, but mostly this is about conversion rates and getting people to click "add rental car" instead of going to Hertz directly.

BMW just opened the configurator for a cheaper, rear-wheel-drive iX3 at €63,400 — seven and a half grand less than the all-wheel-drive version. The marketing pitch is about "demonstrating efficient performance" but really they needed an entry point that doesn't start with a seven. Same 800-volt architecture, same 21-minute charging, just one motor instead of two.

The range drops from 805 to 637 kilometers, which is still more than most people drive in a week. Though BMW managed to bundle the rear-seat heating option with €2,300 worth of other stuff you probably don't need. Nothing says premium like making the back seats warm only if you also buy the head-up display.