This week in car rental & carsharing

Zipcar left the UK earlier this year, which created a gap, and now Brent Council is filling it with Co Wheels and Enterprise. Fine. The timing is a bit funny though — a council cheerfully announcing "more choice" right after the previous choice quietly packed up and left.

Co Wheels is starting in two neighbourhoods for now, with expansion "planned". Which is the polite way of saying it's small and we'll see.

Waymo is now charging real money for rides in Chinese-made electric minivans that get their self-driving brain installed in Arizona, which is apparently how you sidestep tariff headaches in 2025. About 300 of them are running across three cities right now, with thousands more promised by end of 2026.

The Jaguar I-Pace era is quietly fading out. Nobody's writing elegies.

Uber has apparently decided Zagreb is the right place to introduce robotaxis to Europe. Not London, not Paris, not anywhere with a metro system that could handle the optics of a breakdown. Zagreb. The cars are from Wayve, they'll have a safety driver onboard for now, and the whole thing is framed as a milestone. It is, technically. Whether Croatia's roads were on anyone's autonomous-vehicle bingo card is a separate question.

Avis was charging Spanish customers up to €45 every time they got a traffic ticket while renting — framed as an "administrative fee" for telling the authorities who was driving. Which is, apparently, something the law already requires Avis to do anyway, for free. A court ruled the clause illegal in 2020. Avis kept charging it. Spain just handed them the maximum fine: €1 million. Hard to call it a misunderstanding when you've had a court ruling sitting on your desk for five years.

A million loyalty members in ten months sounds impressive until you remember that signing up for a rental program is basically the path of least resistance when the app asks you at checkout. Still, Sixt keeps quietly doing the premium thing while the big American brands argue about fees and EV write-downs. Whether "million members" means a million loyal customers or a million people who tapped "yes" once is a different question entirely.

Nevada handed Tesla a permit for up to 5,000 robotaxis in Clark County, which is a lot of ceiling for a company that quietly admitted 2,500 is probably more realistic — and that the bottleneck isn't the technology. Waymo and Uber each got permits for a thousand. Whether any of them actually fill the streets of Las Vegas with driverless cars in the next twelve months, or just hold a very impressive piece of paper, is genuinely anyone's guess.

ChargePoint put overhead fast chargers in the rental car lot at Portland airport and everyone involved seems very pleased about this. Which is fine. It's a real problem — EVs in rental fleets sitting uncharged because nobody figured out the infrastructure side before buying the cars.

Whether "industry-leading" means anything at a single airport in Oregon is a separate question nobody at the press conference was asking.

Zoomcar — India's P2P car-sharing play — is announcing record contribution profit, which sounds great until you notice it's sponsored content on a financial newsletter site where the company pays for placement. The disclosure section is longer than the actual news. Contribution profit, for the uninitiated, is also not quite the same thing as, you know, profit. But "record" anything reads well in a headline, and in India's market that's probably not nothing.

Hanging the chargers from the ceiling is genuinely clever — keeps cables out of the way, saves floor space, costs less to wire. Portland airport can now top up 20 rental EVs at once during the gap between one customer returning the car and the next one driving off. Practical problem, practical fix.

Whether the rental companies actually stock enough EVs for this to matter is a separate question nobody's answering yet.

Renting a car without putting a deposit on hold sounds genuinely nice, and SANI SIXT in South Africa is making some noise about offering exactly that. Which is fine. It's also a fairly normal practice in several markets, so the "redefining car rental" framing is doing some heavy lifting here.

Deposits have always been the quiet part of the rental experience that everyone hates — your money, frozen, for days after you've already returned the car. Removing that friction is a real thing. Whether it's a revolution is a different question.

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Turo approved a car rental for someone with multiple DUI-related arrests on record. That car ended up on a pedestrian promenade in San Diego, driven by a drunk 22-year-old who hit a 5-year-old girl walking with her family. The child spent seven months in hospital. She can't walk, can't talk, can't eat without a tube.

The family is now suing Turo, the driver, and the city — which apparently never bothered with bollards on a pedestrian path that looked, by their own admission, basically like a road.