This week in car rental & carsharing

One Dutch carsharing operator put a Tesla with FSD into a shared fleet last week, and they're being remarkably honest about it — this is primarily a damage-claims experiment. If strangers using self-driving mode for the first time crash less, the fleet economics get interesting. If they crash more, the feature gets quietly switched off.

The CEO thinks fully driverless shared cars arriving at your door are closer than ten years out. Maybe. But right now someone still has to take the mandatory tutorial before borrowing the robot.

Waymo now has a robotaxi that someone actually built for the job instead of bolting sensors onto a regular car and hoping for the best. The Ojai, made by Zeekr, is purpose-built — no steering wheel, no pedals, no pretending a human might take over. Small fleet, San Francisco for now, but it's the clearest sign yet that the "convert a normal car" era is probably winding down.

Whether the business model ever makes sense is a separate question nobody's quite answered yet.

Waymo landing in Munich is one of those announcements that sounds bigger than it probably is right now. Testing, not operating, not available to anyone, just driving around figuring out Bavarian roundabouts and tram tracks. America's most-hyped robotaxi is coming to Europe mostly to see if Europe tolerates it. Regulators here tend to have opinions about that sort of thing.

NRMA is offloading SIXT Australia to Anchorage Capital Partners, apparently with terms already agreed and paperwork coming within the month. So a mutual-aid motoring institution is handing its rental arm to a mid-market buyout firm. Not exactly surprising — private equity has been circling Australian fleet assets for a while — but it's a clean sign that NRMA decided car rental isn't the core business it once looked like.

Uber and Zipcar figured out they've been solving the same problem for different people and decided to just combine the apps. Now you can grab a Zipcar by the hour through Uber Rent — no separate membership, gas included, unlock with your phone. Neat enough.

The catch is the same one Zipcar always had: you return it where you found it. Which is fine for errands, less fine if you actually needed to get somewhere and stay there.

Rental rates going up 1.5–2%. Insurance costs still biting. Used-car resale no longer bailing anyone out. Windshield replacement on a modern ADAS vehicle can run an extra $1,500 once someone recalibrates all the cameras. So the fleet got cheaper to stock and more expensive to run simultaneously — which is a neat trick.

Corporate travel programs will absorb it quietly. They always do.

The UK government announced robotaxis in London by spring. Spring came and went. TfL hasn't published the guidance companies need to even apply. No vehicles approved, no applications received, no timeline anyone will commit to on record. Meanwhile Zagreb apparently beat the entire UK to it, which is not a sentence anyone had on their bingo card.

100,000 people on the waiting list, and the regulator is publicly saying it's "not in a rush." Comforting.

Found a press release about Hyundai integrating Kaluza's smart charging tech into their vehicles. The idea is that the car talks to the grid and charges when electricity is cheaper or cleaner.

Hyundai is embedding smart charging software into their EVs so the car decides when to charge based on grid conditions and energy prices. Noble in theory. In practice, most people plug in, press nothing, and wake up to whatever happened overnight. Whether the car "optimized" anything or just charged at 11pm like always — nobody checks. The grid gets a footnote in the press release. The owner gets a slightly lower bill, maybe.

99 people in Aberystwyth sharing two electric cars. That's a lot of scheduling around one Renault Zoe. Welsh Government put in a million pounds, the clubs are slowly spreading, and for genuinely rural areas with no real bus to speak of, the logic holds. Whether 500 members across all of Wales counts as momentum or just a very polite pilot programme is a question nobody in the press release was particularly keen to answer.

Waymo just announced it's coming to Germany, which means the EU's robotaxi era is apparently starting in the country where car culture is basically a religion. No driver, no small talk, no one pretending to know a shortcut. Whether German regulators, who are not historically known for moving fast on anything novel, will actually let this scale is a separate conversation entirely.