This week in car rental & carsharing

Hertz bet big on Teslas, put them in every airport photo, called it the future. Then the repair bills arrived. Turns out when someone dents a Model 3 at LAX, fixing it costs considerably more than fixing a Camry, and rental customers are not known for their gentle parking. So now Hertz is quietly selling off a chunk of that fleet and rediscovering the humble hybrid. The "electric future" is still on the website. The cars are on Craigslist.

768,000 shared cars by 2030 — sure, sounds tidy. The more interesting line in this forecast is that operators have quietly stopped chasing growth and started chasing profitability. Which means the last decade was mostly burning cash to sign up 91 million members who apparently didn't use the cars often enough to make the math work.

The fleet's expanding, the memberships are expanding, and the business model is still figuring itself out. Optimistic projections are easy. Parking isn't.

The UK just confirmed EVs will carry a mileage-based charge from 2028 — 3p per mile for full electrics, 1.5p for plug-in hybrids, on top of standard road tax. The logic is straightforward enough: fuel duty receipts are heading toward zero, roads still need paying for, so EV drivers eventually have to chip in.

For rental fleets this is going to be genuinely interesting to price in. Every kilometre becomes a line item.

Airbnb quietly added car rentals through a CarTrawler deal, five countries for now. Which is fine, except CarTrawler is about to become an Expedia brand — meaning Airbnb just handed a distribution win to a company that competes with it on accommodations. The "everything travel app" dream is getting there, one awkward partnership at a time.

MOIA is now running self-driving ID. Buzz vans in Hamburg, rides are free, and there's still a safety driver sitting there doing nothing in particular. So: autonomous-ish, free-ish, at a scale of up to ten vehicles across a few neighbourhoods.

Which is fine, genuinely — you have to start somewhere. But "foundation for international growth strategy" is doing a lot of heavy lifting over what is essentially a small publicly-funded pilot where the car might ask you to rate your experience.

American Airlines has a lot of loyalty partners. SIXT just became one of them — AAdvantage members earn miles when they rent, get status perks, the usual co-branded arrangement. Not revolutionary, but SIXT has been methodically building US presence for a while now, and plugging into one of the largest frequent flyer programs is a reasonable way to get in front of travelers who already spend money at airports. Boring move. Probably a smart one.

Turo is running ads now telling people not to get "carfished" — you book a car online, show up, and it's nothing like the photos. Which is a real problem with traditional rental, and also a fairly bold thing to say out loud when your entire model is built on strangers listing their own cars with their own photos. The irony is right there in the tagline.

Sounds like Europe built the chargers before confirming anyone would actually show up. EV sales are slowing down while the infrastructure keeps expanding, which is either smart long-term planning or a very expensive bet on a timeline that keeps shifting.

Either way, rental fleets watching from the sidelines are probably not rushing to electrify just yet. The plugs are there. The demand math still isn't.