This week in car rental & carsharing

Stellantis just sold its Free2move carsharing operation to a private equity firm, which is basically the corporate version of "not my problem anymore." Fourteen cities, a free-floating fleet, an app — all handed off with the usual promises about operational improvement and a renewed focus on customer experience, which are words that appear in literally every PE acquisition announcement ever written.

The EV transition is still on the roadmap, apparently. Under new management. After a carve-out. Good luck with that.

Hertz managed to lose 40% of its stock value and then apparently showed up to the shareholder meeting with the energy of someone who doesn't fully grasp the room. Investors are not thrilled. The EV bet that looked bold on a slide deck turned into a fleet management problem nobody priced correctly. There's a specific kind of corporate confidence that survives almost anything except the actual numbers, and Hertz seems to be testing how long that lasts.

No steering wheel, no pedals, no mirrors — and now, apparently, a fare meter. NHTSA gave Zoox the green light to actually charge money for rides in its little passenger pods, which is a genuine first for a purpose-built autonomous vehicle in the US. Up to 2,500 a year, two-year window, Las Vegas first.

Whether anyone gets in willingly is a separate question the regulator didn't answer.

Avis missed earnings by nearly half — $0.98 against $1.82 expected — and the stock went up. Which tells you something about how low the bar had already been set. Revenue down, margins questionable, analysts sitting at zero buy ratings. And yet, up 1.6%.

Sometimes the market is just relieved you're still breathing.

Verra Mobility just locked in another seven years with Avis Budget on tolling and violations processing — which sounds stable until you read the part where they admit the new terms are "materially less favorable" than before. Avis also negotiated the right to bring some of this in-house. So: same client, longer contract, worse economics, and a slow-motion option to need you less. Seven years is a long time to watch that play out.

Zoox just got federal sign-off to put fully driverless robotaxis on US roads — no steering wheel, no pedals, nobody up front pretending to supervise. That's a genuine first, and credit where it's due.

Whether this becomes actual taxis on actual streets anytime soon is a different question. Approval and deployment are different sports, and the gap between "permitted" and "operational at scale" tends to be where the interesting problems live.

Avis went into summer expecting World Cup tourists and America's 250th birthday to fill the lots. Then May arrived and bookings quietly started going the other way. Overseas visitors down 8%, TSA counts sliding. So they sold off cars while used-vehicle prices were still decent, ended the quarter with the smallest summer fleet since 2021, and somehow made more money doing it.

Fewer cars, higher utilization, better margins. At some point "demand was soft" stops being bad news and starts sounding like a business strategy.

Uber tried building its own self-driving cars, killed a pedestrian in Arizona, sold the whole division off, and declared it was done with moonshots. Then, roughly two years later, quietly started cutting deals with every AV startup it could find — over 30 of them now, across multiple continents. No hardware, no liability, just equity stakes and platform agreements while someone else does the hard part.

It's a decent position to be in, actually. Let others burn the R&D budgets. Uber just needs the trips to flow through its app.

Couldn't find a link, attached file, or pasted text here — just the headline. Drop the actual article and I'll work with it.

Turo dropped a $2,338 damage claim — but only after a journalist got involved. The renter had photos proving the damage was pre-existing, Turo initially agreed, then quietly reopened the case anyway and started billing. Twice.

The peer-to-peer model is fine until an owner decides their existing dent is your problem now. No corporate fleet manager to call, no clear appeals process, just you vs. someone's car and a platform that apparently treats "case closed" as a rough draft.