This week in car rental & carsharing

So MOIA, the Volkswagen-backed shuttle thing that's been doing robotaxi-adjacent work in Hamburg, has teamed up with Beep to run actual passenger service in Orlando. Which is a sentence that would have sounded futuristic about eight years ago and now just sounds like two transit-adjacent companies trying to stay relevant in Florida.

Whether Orlando needs another shuttle option between its theme parks and parking structures is a different question entirely.

So Mercedes is getting into bed with Wayve, the British AI driving startup that basically bets the whole thing on "the software will figure it out eventually." Bold partnership. Mercedes gets to say "autonomous" in press releases again, Wayve gets a very credible logo to stand next to. Whether any of this reaches actual roads at any meaningful scale — well, that part's always in the next phase.

500,000 rides a week sounds like a lot until you notice that 80% of the fleet is basically parked between California and Texas. Fifteen cities on paper, a handful of cities in practice.

The new minivan is Chinese-built, which is an interesting move for a company currently absorbing tariff costs on the very thing it's betting its scale on. Waymo's burning Alphabet money fast enough that the geography probably doesn't matter yet. Whether it matters later is a different question.

Gasoline in Europe costs what it costs, and apparently that's finally enough to make an EV feel like a reasonable decision rather than a lifestyle statement. Sales numbers are moving. People are doing the math at the pump instead of at the ideology counter, which is probably how it should have worked from the start.

Whether rental fleets and carsharing operators follow the customer or keep hedging is the actual question nobody's answering cleanly yet.

Nearly a third of new cars sold in Europe last August were electric. A year ago it was one in five. Combustion cars — gas and diesel combined — are now below 30% for the year, which means the thing that was supposed to be a niche has quietly lapped the thing that was supposed to be permanent.

Rental fleets are going to have a fun few years catching up with that.

Hertz is leaning into hybrids now, which is quietly telling. Not EVs, not the Tesla fleet they famously bought and then had to quietly offload — hybrids. The kind of car that doesn't require you to plan your route around a charger. A 58 percent jump in demand is hard to ignore, and it basically says that customers want to feel good about their rental without the range anxiety homework.

Rental companies have been quietly learning this the hard way for a couple of years now — tourists show up, see the EV option, and immediately ask what's next on the list. Range anxiety plus unfamiliar roads plus "where exactly is that charger" equals a very easy no. Iceland is just saying out loud what most airport counters already know from the returns queue.

Cheap fuel kills the urgency, expensive fuel revives it — Europeans have been through this loop enough times to recognize it. Oil spikes, EV interest climbs, governments point at the charts and call it a trend.

Whether it holds once pump prices settle back down is a different question, and the answer historically hasn't been flattering for the optimists.