This week in car rental & carsharing

Verra Mobility's CEO just bailed after Avis dumped them and their stock fell 70% in one day. Three weeks earlier, on an earnings call, the same CEO was telling investors that contract talks with Avis were "ongoing and constructive." Then boom — termination notice, revised guidance, $1.4 billion in market cap gone.

The lawyers are circling now, asking whether management knew those "constructive" conversations were actually going nowhere. Avis was worth more than 10% of their revenue, so this wasn't some minor client walking away. It's the kind of surprise that makes you wonder what else wasn't quite as solid as it looked on the quarterly calls.

The EU's car package keeps getting more ambitious on paper and more distant in reality. Social Democrats now want 65% electric quotas for company fleets by 2030, up from the Commission's already optimistic 54%. Austria gets bumped to 70%. The timeline? Maybe 2027, if the stars align and nobody has elections.

Meanwhile, the car lobby is doing what car lobbies do, the EPP is pushing back, and everyone's pretending fleet managers will just magic up charging infrastructure and employee buy-in because Brussels wrote a number on some paper. The gap between regulatory wishful thinking and parking lot reality keeps getting wider.

Samsung SDI is reportedly joining the Unified Cell party at Volkswagen, which is either smart diversification or a sign that making batteries is harder than VW thought when they launched PowerCo with great fanfare. The Koreans are supposedly retrofitting lines in Hungary to pump out VW's standardised cells by 2027, joining the German subsidiary and a Chinese partner who are already on the hook.

Three suppliers for one cell format sounds like hedging your bets, not confidence in your original plan. Then again, battery supply chains have a habit of catching fire, literally and figuratively, so maybe having options isn't the worst idea.

SAIC's parent company is pumping cash into their car rental arm, which sounds like the kind of thing that happens when the books aren't looking great on their own. Chinese automakers have been trying to crack global mobility services for years now, usually by throwing money at the problem until something sticks.

The timing's interesting — rental demand is decent but margins are brutal, and most carsharing experiments outside China have been expensive lessons in why people just want to own cars. Maybe they've figured something out, or maybe this is just another round of "let's see what happens if we fund it properly this time."

Rental companies figured out what EV evangelists won't admit: most people want to save money on gas, not spend their vacation hunting for charging stations. A Burlington Thrifty owner says customers finally started asking for electric cars, but he doesn't have any — just hybrids that cost ten dollars more per day but save you more than that at the pump.

Hertz famously dumped a third of its global EV fleet last year after the great electrification experiment crashed into reality. Turns out renting an unfamiliar car in an unfamiliar city while worrying about where to charge it isn't most people's idea of a relaxing trip. The infrastructure works fine until you're the one who needs it to work.

Fleet sales numbers came out barely nudging ahead of last year, which apparently counts as news when the margins are this thin. Rental companies bought 0.9% more cars through May than they did in 2025 — basically a rounding error dressed up as a trend. Commercial and government fleets actually bought fewer vehicles, but rental kept the overall number positive.

The whole thing reads like an economy that can't decide what it wants to do. GDP growth at 1.6%, fleet sales up by fractions, everyone calling it "favorable conditions" because nobody wants to say flat. When your year-over-year growth fits inside a margin of error, maybe the story isn't growth at all.

Stellantis is building Chinese EVs in Malaysia now, which sounds like the most 2024 thing until you realise they're targeting the entire Southeast Asian market from one factory. The Leapmotor C10 gets knocked-down kits shipped over and assembled locally, then exported to Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia. It's basically using Malaysia as the regional hub for cars that were designed in China by a brand most people still haven't heard of.

The numbers look decent on paper — 60,000 unit capacity, modest investment, growing sales figures. But there's something quietly desperate about a European giant needing a Chinese EV startup to crack Asian markets. Stellantis owns Peugeot, Chrysler, Jeep, and they're betting on Leapmotor to teach them how to sell electric cars in the tropics.

Amsterdam's raising tourist taxes to 20% by 2030, hoping people will finally stop showing up. They've tried the polite "Stay Away" campaigns, banned new hotels, and now they're just making it expensive. The math is cute — charging more to fewer people somehow adds up to €75 million annually.

Classic government logic: if the problem is too many tourists, the solution must be higher taxes. Not like rental cars and rideshares don't already cost a fortune there. At some point you're just pricing out the regular visitors and keeping the ones who don't care what anything costs.

Commercial fleet sales hit a speed bump in May after months of solid gains, down about 2% from last year. Rental fleets picked up the slack with a small uptick, government buying stayed flat. The numbers people are calling it a "mini dip" and wondering if it's a trend or just noise.

Business investment keeps chugging along, GDP looks decent, so demand should hold up. But fleet buyers have been cautious for years now, and one soft month after a strong run doesn't really tell you much. Sometimes the market just takes a breath.

Turo built a calculator that tells you if renting an EV will save money versus gas at current prices. Sounds helpful until you realize they're basically admitting their platform is confusing enough that people need a separate tool to figure out what anything costs.

Gas hit $4.56 nationally, California's at $6, so the math probably works out for EVs on a lot of trips. But the real question isn't the fuel savings — it's whether you want to spend your vacation hunting for chargers that may or may not work, in a car you've never driven, with an app you downloaded yesterday.

Hertz is back in Delaware court asking a judge to bless a settlement over those stock buybacks that happened right before everything went sideways. The private equity folks who loaded the company with debt want to close the book on shareholder lawsuits about whether they timed their cash extraction a little too perfectly.

Meanwhile Virtu's founder is trying to get dismissed from a case claiming he basically designed the company's ownership structure to funnel himself a billion-dollar payout. Creative capital engineering meets creative litigation. Delaware stays busy.