This week in car rental & carsharing

Turo now delivers the car to you instead of making you queue at a counter. Genuinely useful, and the 32% growth in hotel/home deliveries suggests people were already figuring this out on their own. The catch is still the same one it's always been — it's a stranger's car, driven over by another stranger, and if something goes sideways there's no fleet desk to argue with. Convenient until it isn't.

EV sales softer than expected, so Hyundai's CEO stands up and says the fix is building tens of thousands of robotaxis for Waymo. Which is one way to keep a factory busy, sure. Whether "robotaxi volumes" is a real demand signal or just a more photogenic version of excess capacity is a question nobody on stage seemed particularly interested in asking.

The EV price gap with gas cars is down to about 9% now, which sounds like progress until you remember the average new car in the US costs over $50,000 and nobody's exactly celebrating affordability on either side. Cheaper EVs are selling better because they're cheaper — groundbreaking insight from the data.

For rental fleets watching this: the math still doesn't fully close, and "closing in" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that headline.

Renaming a major airport after a president is one thing. Apparently nobody told the car rental booking systems, because half the fleet is still showing up under PBI and the other half under DJT — and they're almost entirely different companies. Same airport, same dates, completely different cars and prices depending on which code you type.

If you operate there and haven't checked both codes on Kayak or wherever, there's a real chance half your potential customers simply can't see your inventory right now.

The EU asking China to voluntarily limit its own car exports is a diplomatic way of saying "we can't agree internally on tariffs, so please just… stop?" China's automakers have been eating into European hybrid sales faster than Brussels can schedule a committee meeting about it. Whether Beijing plays along is a different conversation entirely.

Turo in Canada got a glowing travel-blog writeup, which is sweet. Someone had a fine experience, met a nice host, drove a decent car. That's real. It's also basically a testimonial from one trip, which is how every peer-to-peer platform looks when it works — magical. Ask again when the host cancels three hours before your ferry.

"Is this the future of car rental?" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for what is essentially borrowing a stranger's Civic.

Looks like Waymo is going international. Singapore gets the next pilot, which makes a certain kind of sense — small, dense, well-mapped, government that actually cooperates. A controlled environment dressed up as a market expansion.

Whether "coming to Singapore" means a dozen cars in one district or something people can actually use daily, that part's always in the fine print. Robotaxis have been "arriving" somewhere new roughly every quarter for about six years now.