This week in car rental & carsharing

Sixt keeps doing the boring thing well. Revenue up over 11%, earnings up nearly 40%, and they got there by deliberately not buying more cars than people actually wanted to rent. Fleet grew slower than demand, utilization went up, numbers looked tidy. No drama, no pivot announcement.

The premium push is real too — 62% of new fleet additions were premium models last half. Apparently renting nicer cars to people who'll pay for nicer cars still works as a business model. Wild concept.

Pony.ai and Uber just announced they're putting 2,000+ robotaxis on European roads together. Which sounds bold until you remember that announcing robotaxis in Europe and actually running them in European traffic, under European regulators, in European weather, are three very different projects.

The partnership makes sense on paper — Pony.ai has the cars, Uber has the app. Whether the streets of wherever-they're-starting agree is another conversation entirely.

Pony AI is coming to Europe with Uber, two thousand robotaxis, and a lot of confidence about how ready European streets are for this. No specific city named yet, no timeline that means anything, just the number and the announcement.

China's autonomous vehicle sector has been moving fast domestically, which is real. Whether that translates to Lisbon or Warsaw or wherever they're actually planning to go is a different conversation entirely. Regulators tend to have opinions.

Lotte decided a car rental business wasn't really a Lotte problem anymore, so they handed it to TPG for $925 million and presumably went back to whatever else a giant Korean conglomerate does on a Tuesday. Private equity buying a mid-size rental fleet is either a boring financial move or the setup for a familiar story about cost-cutting and a sale in five years. Probably both.

Lotte is offloading its rental car arm to TPG for nearly a billion dollars, which is a tidy sum for a business that's basically "cars you borrow and return." The Lotte Group needed the cash, TPG needed a foothold, and South Korea's largest rental fleet just changed hands the way these things usually do — quietly, in an all-equity structure, with a press release nobody outside the industry read.

Eight years, cars parked at condos and malls and transit hubs, the whole "you don't need to own a car" pitch — and Socar Malaysia is done by end of August. The IPO didn't happen, SK Inc bought out the financial investors, and here we are. Trevo, their peer-to-peer side, keeps going, which is a neat way to stay in the market without actually owning any cars anymore. The fleet model just keeps losing to the model where someone else owns the asset.

Looks like the headline got cut off — could you paste the full text or the link? Happy to work with it once I can read the whole thing.

Found the link but there's no article text loaded here — just the headline. Paste the article text or attach the file and I'll write the post.

Turo's damage rules are genuinely a maze. The short version: the host owns the car, the guest drove it, and when a tire goes flat everyone starts pointing at the other person while Turo's support queue loads. The protection plans cover some things, exclude others, and the fine print does a lot of heavy lifting. People are surprised — which is odd, because "whose problem is this, exactly?" is usually worth checking before you leave the driveway.

Turo banned a customer mid-crisis — while they were actively trying to rebook after *Turo's own host* didn't show up — and then declined to explain why. No appeal, no context, just a notification. The peer-to-peer pitch sounds great until the peer ghosts you on a side street in Bushwick and the platform punishes you for it.

NYC is already a rough market for this model. No fleet backup, no guaranteed parking, hosts who may or may not feel like showing up. Sometimes the boring airport counter is boring for a reason.