This week in car rental & carsharing

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London said yes to supervised robotaxi rides, which means a human still sits there ready to grab the wheel. So it's less "the future is here" and more "the future is here but we don't fully trust it yet, which, fair enough." Wayve and Uber get to call it a milestone. Passengers get to feel like a beta test. Everyone's happy on paper.

NRMA has been running a car rental business under the Sixt brand across Australia — 18,000 vehicles, 140 locations, not exactly a side project. Now they're shopping it around with an investment bank mandated to find a buyer. Classic sign that someone ran the numbers and decided the core business isn't renting Corollas at the airport.

Mike Baird takes the helm of a 106-year-old mutual and one of the first moves is an exit. Draw your own conclusions about what "strategic focus" means this year.

Rental companies are quietly buying fewer cars, and the ones they do buy are trucks and SUVs — passenger cars are basically disappearing from rental fleets, down 18% year over year. Overall fleet purchases are off about 4%, and the gap kept widening through July. Nobody's panicking publicly, but the trend line is pretty clear.

Whether that's discipline or hesitation probably depends on who you ask.

Car rental is supposedly the "good news" category in the 2026 business travel forecast — only up 3.6%, trailing hotels and airfares. And by 2027 it's actually projected to dip slightly, making it the one travel segment where prices might behave. Meanwhile flights are heading toward a 9% jump in economy fares, so the rental car bill is starting to look almost reasonable by comparison. Almost.

WeRide's robotaxis are coming to Denmark via GreenMobility. No driver, no small talk, no one to blame when it takes the wrong exit.

Denmark's a small, well-mapped country with a population that genuinely follows rules, so if robotaxis work anywhere in Europe, it's probably there. Whether "it works in Copenhagen" eventually becomes "it works everywhere" is the part nobody can actually promise yet.

Hertz posted a smaller loss than the quarter before and apparently that's the turnaround story now. Not profit. Just… less bad. The EV write-downs, the insurance costs, the fleet that aged badly — none of that is fixed, but the direction of the number changed slightly, so the headline gets to say "boon." Rental car accounting is a generous art form.

Airbnb is now bundling car rentals and airport transfers into its app for Spain — timed perfectly around the solar eclipse next week that's expected to pull in around 10 million visitors. Smart move. The awkward part is that the car rental layer runs on CarTrawler, which Expedia is in the process of buying for roughly $350 million. So Airbnb built its big OTA ambition on infrastructure its main competitor is about to own. That's quite a dependency to discover mid-pivot.