This week in car rental & carsharing

London has 42% of residents without a car, arguably the best case for carsharing in Europe, and somehow ended up with 330 vehicles serving the whole city after Zipcar left. Three hundred and thirty. The replacements that were "considering expansion" six months ago are still considering it.

The real tell is that over half of former Zipcar users are now thinking about buying a car. Which is pretty much the opposite of what carsharing is supposed to do.

Hertz just borrowed $350 million in a structure where it doesn't even have to pay the interest in cash — it can just issue more debt instead. That's the PIK part. "Enhancing liquidity" is the PR part. A company paying interest with IOUs is either very clever or very squeezed, and the line between those two tends to get clearer over time.

Nissan spent years stuffing rental fleets because volume looks great on a spreadsheet and terrible in a showroom. Cheap rental returns flood the used market, drag down resale values, and quietly teach consumers that your brand is something you get at the airport when the good ones are gone. The new CEO is saying the quiet part out loud now. Respect for the honesty, mild skepticism about whether the fleet sales addiction is actually over or just temporarily embarrassing.

VW and Bosch spent years building an automated driving alliance, quietly concluded it wasn't going anywhere fast enough, and dissolved it. What they got out of it: a hands-free Level 2 system that'll show up in the ID.EVERY1 in 2027. Which is fine, but Level 2 is roughly "the car steers while you pretend to pay attention."

The actual goal was Level 3 — eyes off the road, vehicle responsible. That apparently wasn't coming soon enough, so now VW is shopping for a new partner. Mobileye's name keeps coming up. Naturally.

€950 million, state subsidies, a 12-hectare site near Valladolid, and a minister going on record saying he's "firmly convinced" the full €5 billion will follow. That's a lot of conviction about a project that doesn't have a completion timeline for phase one yet, let alone phase two.

The original partner couldn't submit the required guarantees, so Gotion stepped in as the shareholder who actually has money. Which is fine, but also explains why the enthusiasm in the press release is running slightly ahead of the schedule.

This reads like someone fed "Sixt exists and rents cars" into a press release generator and hit publish. Premium positioning, digital tools, fleet rotation — sure. Nothing here that would surprise anyone who's driven past a Sixt counter at an airport. Sometimes a company just does the thing it does, and that's apparently enough for an ad hoc notice.

Mercedes announces record orders for the electric GLC, then quietly confirms it can't actually build enough of them. Batteries stuck in transit from China because the new CATL plant in Hungary hit a certification wall, wiring harnesses delayed after flooding knocked out a supplier in Morocco. Six-month wait times for customers. The supply chain for a single car now runs through Stuttgart, Debrecen, Morocco, and a container ship somewhere in between — and apparently one heavy rain is enough to slow the whole thing down.

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China taxed PHEVs for free since 2012, watched the market grow to 63% NEV share, and has now decided that's probably enough free riding. From 2027, plug-in hybrids pay annual vehicle tax like everyone else. Pure BEVs stay exempt, mostly because Chinese tax law ties the levy to engine displacement — and a BEV technically has none, so the math just doesn't work.

The amounts involved are modest, around €40–80 a year depending on the province. But the direction is clear enough.

Avis Budget is apparently doing fine on the demand side — people still want to rent cars, the revenue is there. The problem is everything underneath that. Liquidity is thin, the balance sheet carries a lot of weight, and "strong demand" starts to sound less reassuring when the financial cushion is that narrow. Busy airports don't automatically fix a stretched capital structure. The cars are moving, the cash flow math is just doing its own thing.

Hertz just raised $350M by issuing notes that pay interest in more notes instead of cash, which is either creative financing or a sign that cash is the one thing you don't have. Shares touched $2.14 the same day. Morgan Stanley cut the price target, JPMorgan stayed Underweight, citing depreciation costs that keep climbing. At some point "the cars are losing value faster than we make money" stops being an analyst note and starts being the whole story.

The U.S. EV forecast just got quietly cut from nearly half of all car sales by 2030 down to 17%. Not because demand collapsed or the technology broke — mostly because the policy scaffolding got dismantled. Credits gone, fuel economy rules softened, federal push reversed. BloombergNEF now expects the plug-in share to actually shrink in 2026 and 2027 before recovering.

Which is a strange way to run a transition. Turns out "the market will figure it out" works better when someone doesn't also remove the conditions that made the market move in the first place.

The EU Parliament wants highway charging stations to skip the permit queue entirely. No paperwork, no approval, just build it. Sounds almost too sensible for Brussels, which is probably why it still needs trilogue negotiations, member state sign-off, and whatever the Council decides to slow down this week.

Nothing is final. It rarely is. But if the automatic approval idea survives — where silence from regulators counts as a yes — that alone would be a minor miracle in European infrastructure bureaucracy.

You can now find a charger, check the price, and pay — all without leaving HERE WeGo. Revolutionary stuff, if you've ever stood at a charging station holding three different apps wondering which one actually works here.

The caveat is the usual one: both the station and the operator need to be listed on both platforms. So it works great right up until the charger you need is on one but not the other. Still, fewer apps per charging stop is quietly a real improvement.