This week in car rental & carsharing

Getaround just sold off its European business to GoMore for about €31.5 million and called it a day. The whole thing reads like an orderly retreat — sell what you can, pay down the debt, ask shareholders to vote on shutting down completely. They're even borrowing a few million more just to cover the costs of closing properly.

The carsharing dream was supposed to scale everywhere at once. Turns out running fleets in multiple countries while burning cash is exactly as hard as it sounds. Someone at GoMore apparently thinks they can make the European piece work. Good luck with that.

Verra Mobility spent months telling investors everything was fine with their Avis contract negotiations, right up until Avis dropped a termination notice and the stock lost 70% in a day. The CEO quietly left a week later. Now there's a class action brewing and lawyers asking pointed questions about what management knew and when they knew it.

The company does toll processing and traffic enforcement tech for rental car fleets. Losing Avis — one of their three biggest customers — apparently came as a "surprise" that wiped $1.4 billion off their market cap. The kind of surprise that makes you wonder what those renewal talks actually sounded like behind closed doors.

GM keeps pivoting on battery chemistry like they're ordering lunch. First it was nickel-based cells, then they pivoted to LFP for cheaper costs, now they're eyeing lithium-manganese-rich cells that supposedly offer better energy density at the same price. The Spring Hill plant they retooled for LFP? Those batteries are going to stationary storage instead of cars.

LMR sounds promising on paper — higher density, lower cost than cobalt — but it's got durability issues and charges slowly. GM's been developing it for over a decade, which either means they're really thorough or it's really hard to get right. Market-ready by 2028, they say. That's a lot of pivots between now and then.

Mercedes-Benz just fired up production of their new VLE electric van in Spain, complete with the usual factory celebration photos and speeches about transformation. They're calling it a premium model starting around €82,000, which puts it squarely in "luxury shuttle for tech conferences" territory rather than anything a normal delivery company would touch.

The interesting bit is they're taking blind orders — people buying a van they've never driven. Either Mercedes has serious confidence in this thing, or the commercial EV market is so starved for options that fleet managers are willing to gamble on whatever shows up at the dock.

Avis Budget just announced they're "reshaping their toll tech and debt profile for future returns," which sounds like corporate speak for "we borrowed money to buy some software and now we need to explain why this was genius."

The toll management thing makes sense — rental customers hate surprise bills weeks later, and Avis hates the administrative mess of chasing down who drove through which booth. Automating that process probably saves real money. The debt restructuring part sounds less thrilling, but refinancing when rates were better isn't exactly visionary strategy. Sometimes the most boring moves are the ones that quietly work.

Stellantis stuffed solid-state batteries into a Dodge Charger and called it a breakthrough. The cells supposedly charge to 90% in eighteen minutes and boost range by eighty percent, which sounds great until you remember we've been hearing these exact promises about solid-state tech for about a decade now. The difference this time is they actually built a working car instead of just a PowerPoint slide.

The real test isn't whether it works in their lab — it's whether anyone can afford to buy one when it hits production, assuming it ever does. Factorial Energy has three different automakers backing them, which either means they're onto something or everyone's hedging the same expensive bet.

Car rental companies keep talking about "demand recovery" while quietly dealing with the math that doesn't add up. Fleet costs went up, insurance went bonkers, and airport fees multiplied like parking tickets. Meanwhile travelers figured out that ride-sharing to the hotel and walking beats the rental counter experience about half the time.

The growth projections sound optimistic until you factor in that nobody really solved the underlying problem — renting a car at an airport is still unnecessarily complicated and expensive for what you get.

Stellantis decided Luxembourg is the perfect place to test robot taxis, probably because it's small enough that if something goes wrong, the whole country can just walk home. They're teaming up with Bolt and some Chinese AI company to put autonomous Peugeot vans on the road, aiming for full Level 4 operation by the end of the pilot.

Luxembourg apparently has "forward-looking regulations" for this stuff, which likely translates to "hasn't banned it yet." The van choice is interesting — nothing says cutting-edge mobility future like a boxy people-mover that looks like it delivers parcels for a living.

Turo and Geico just quietly dropped their lawsuit over claim denials, which probably means someone's lawyers did the math on discovery costs versus settlement checks. The whole mess started because Geico kept refusing to pay out when Turo renters crashed cars, claiming the peer-to-peer model voided coverage somehow.

Turns out when you let strangers rent your Honda through an app, the insurance gets complicated fast. Nobody wants to explain in court exactly how the liability flows when your renter rear-ends someone at a Costco. Easier to shake hands and pretend it never happened.

BYD spent months talking up their big Turkey factory plan — billion-dollar investment, shiny new plant in Manisa, cars rolling out by 2026. Now they've quietly put it on hold and started shopping for an existing factory somewhere in Southern Europe instead. No timeline, no explanation, just "we're looking at other options now."

Funny how these grand manufacturing announcements tend to get a lot quieter when it's time to actually pour concrete. Turns out scouting for someone else's old plant beats building from scratch. Hungary's still happening, apparently, but even that got pushed back a year. The pivot from "new billion-dollar facility" to "maybe we'll buy someone's leftovers" happened awfully fast.

Stellantis just told 1.3 million Jeep owners to park their cars away from buildings because the power steering wiring might catch fire. Even when the engine's off. The recall covers Wranglers and Gladiators from 2021 through 2025, so basically their entire recent production run.

Nothing says "rugged outdoor adventure vehicle" quite like "please don't park this near your house." Fix coming in July, they promise. Meanwhile, rental fleets are probably eyeing their Jeep inventory and wondering if that's the kind of surprise their customers signed up for.

DKV Mobility just figured out that corporate EV fleets need more than highway charging to actually work. They've been doing the public charging card thing across Europe for a while, hit 1.2 million access points, but apparently someone finally noticed that company cars also need to plug in at home and at the office.

So now they're rolling out workplace and home charging solutions to Italy and Switzerland, after already doing Germany and a few other markets. It's the kind of obvious gap that probably seemed fine on paper until actual fleet managers started asking why their drivers in Zurich couldn't expense charging at home like the ones in Munich.

BYD wants to drop 3,000 of their "Flash Chargers" across Europe by 2027, promising five-minute top-ups with 1.5 megawatts of power. Sounds incredible until you realize exactly one car sold in Europe can actually handle that speed — their own $133,000 luxury sedan. Everyone else gets to use a fraction of what they're paying for.

It's the charging equivalent of building a runway for supersonic jets when most people are still flying propeller planes. Tesla has 20,000 chargers that work with everything. BYD will have 3,000 that work perfectly with almost nothing. Bold strategy.