This week in car rental & carsharing

Getaround is done. The creditor that kept it on life support just took 90.9% of the company and voted to pull the plug — dissolution, wind-down, liquidation, whatever word makes it sound more orderly than it is. The peer-to-peer carsharing dream, the "Airbnb for cars" pitch, the SPAC debut — all of it ends at a special stockholder meeting nobody's excited about. Equity holders get to watch.

Mudrick Capital just converted another 100 million Getaround notes into equity at $0.25 a share, bringing their total position to something like 870 million shares. That's not a vote of confidence — that's a creditor deciding equity is fine when you already own most of the company anyway.

Getaround peaked above $10 post-SPAC. Now a major insider is locking in at a quarter. The carsharing dream is still technically alive, just apparently worth about 97% less than advertised.

BYD became Germany's top-selling PHEV brand in May, which is a remarkable achievement — and also a fairly predictable outcome when you leave a door wide open and then act surprised someone walked through it. The EU spent 2024 building a careful tariff structure for Chinese EVs, and apparently nobody noticed PHEVs weren't in it until Chinese brands quietly made them 70% of their European sales mix.

The Commission now wants to fix that. Only took about eighteen months.

Stellantis spent years positioning itself as the company that lets you choose — ICE, hybrid, electric, whatever fits your life. Very principled. Very flexible. Except when it comes to small cars for Europe, where that flexibility quietly disappears and the new 2CV revival will be electric-only, full stop.

Which is less a bold vision and more basic math. Making a tiny combustion car meet upcoming EU emissions rules costs more than the car is worth. So the "freedom of choice" stays in the brochure, and the small-car segment gets one option.

VW Group is now building a new electric drive unit in Győr — €350 million into the plant, Hungarian government chipping in, 260 jobs secured. The first car to get it is the Cupra Raval, followed by a small EV family that includes the ID. Polo, ID. Cross, and Skoda Epiq.

The top Raval variant does 0–100 in 6.8 seconds and tops out at 175 km/h, which is fine for a city car trying to look sporty. Just don't plan a motorway trip.

Hyundai is building a battery assembly line in Turkey for a new affordable EV, spending €55 million of a much larger package on 27 robots and 300-plus new jobs. The LFP cells will come from China, the NMC ones from Hungary, and the whole thing gets bolted together in İzmit. Neat enough supply chain logic, though "sourced from China" will get an interesting reception in Brussels once the Ioniq 3 starts showing up on European driveways.

Poland tried this already. The first attempt at a national EV brand — Izera — got as far as a prototype and some optimistic press releases before quietly collapsing in 2024. Now the same company is back, this time with Foxconn, a 400,000-vehicle factory, and a 2029 start date that's conveniently far enough away to sound serious.

Could work. Foxconn actually knows how to build things at scale. But "we'll sign the joint venture agreement soon" plus "construction starts 2027" plus €1 billion from recovery funds is a lot of future tense for a project with this particular track record.

Ford is building its own battery plant in Michigan, licensing the tech from CATL, getting trained by CATL staff, and leaning on CATL expertise to run the whole thing. Fully American-owned, deeply Chinese-operated. The pickup it's all meant for arrives in 2027, so there's still plenty of time for something to quietly change.

QuantumScape just added Honda to its dance card, which is interesting given VW has been the main backer for years. Honda apparently ran "one of the most rigorous assessments" before signing — which is a polite way of saying they kicked the tires very hard before committing to anything.

Still a research deal, not a production contract. QuantumScape's whole model is licensing, not making things at scale themselves, so collecting credible automotive partners is basically the product. Honda's name carries weight. Whether the battery ever makes it into a car you can actually buy is a different conversation.

Sponsored content dressed as insight — always a fun genre. Someone wants fleet operators to know that yes, charging trucks is harder than charging a hatchback, and yes, you should buy sophisticated kit instead of just plugging in a bigger cable. Probably not wrong, exactly.

The one figure that actually lands: 87% of truck trips stay under 150 km. Which quietly deflates half the "range anxiety kills electrification" argument before it starts.

Greece's PPC dropping 600 EV chargers across Romanian DIY stores is actually a sensible idea — people are already there, cars are parked, might as well plug in while buying tiles. The rollout starts in smaller Romanian cities first, which is at least honest about where public charging is genuinely missing.

Whether 50 kW average matters or it's mostly slow AC topped up with a few fast ones, nobody's saying yet.

A hedge fund shows up with 7% of your stock and basically says "sell the company or we'll bring our own board." Whitbread's CEO gets on an earnings call and says the plan is working. Which, fine, maybe it is. Though he also admitted things will get worse before they get better, which is a fun thing to say when someone's already asking why they shouldn't just cash out.

Classic standoff. One side has a thesis, the other has a roadmap. Neither is wrong yet.