This week in car rental & carsharing

London's getting supervised robotaxis now — Uber and Wayve doing the thing where you put a safety driver in the seat and call it autonomous. Which is fine, that's how it works, but "supervised robotaxi" is doing some heavy lifting as a phrase. The streets are genuinely complicated there, so if the tech holds up in London it probably holds up most places. Still, we're a long way from the part where the safety driver gets to stay home.

The company that scans your driver's license at the Hertz counter just leaked 153 million of them. Name, address, date of birth, license number — the full package, sitting somewhere it shouldn't be. You hand over your ID to rent a Hyundai for a weekend, and it turns out that scan goes into a database managed by a third party you've never heard of and apparently never needed to worry about. Until now.

Rental companies outsource everything. The car, the counter software, the ID scanning, the risk.

The car rental industry apparently needed three years and a full column to confirm what most operators already felt in their bones: the cheap end of the fleet is gone, everyone wants a small SUV, and the manufacturers aren't exactly lining up to help.

Nothing structurally new here, just tighter. Same business, less room to absorb a bad quarter.

Thirty-three percent cheaper to run — fine, that's a real number. Though it tends to assume you're charging at home overnight, not at a motorway fast-charger that charges you like it's printing money.

For rental fleets it gets more complicated fast. Lower fuel costs look great on a spreadsheet until you factor in the dead time, the range anxiety returns, and the guest who plugged it in wrong. The math works. The operations part is still a work in progress.

Rural carsharing where the riders are also the fleet owners — that's either genuinely clever or the kind of thing that sounds clever in a grant application. YouTaxi is running a pilot where locals effectively drive each other around using shared cars, which solves the "no cars here" problem by making the community the operator. Whether regular people actually want to run a carsharing scheme on top of their lives is a different question entirely.

Free2move is pulling out of Washington D.C., blaming fleet contracts running out and "focusing on core European markets." Which is a polished way of saying the numbers never worked and nobody's signing up for another round. Another carsharing exit from North America, another farewell letter full of gratitude and checkmarks. The privilege of driving alongside you, apparently, has a price point.

Tesla launched the Cybercab on Thursday. By Friday, federal regulators were already asking how exactly a car with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no mirrors passed safety certification. Tesla self-certified it. NHTSA is now auditing that process — same thing they did with Zoox not long ago.

No controls is apparently a selling point until it's a compliance question.

Singapore carsharing company lets you book a car and just... drive to Malaysia. No deposit, no counter queue, no returning the car to a different city. Just a 30% surcharge on top of your time charge, capped at around S$20–35 a day depending on the car and the day.

Nearly 2,000 people signed up for the pilot within 48 hours, which either means the demand is real or Singaporeans really hate rental car queues. Probably both.