This week in car rental & carsharing

Uber has now partnered with over 30 AV companies, which is either a bold global strategy or a very expensive way of avoiding the question of whether any of this actually works at scale. London gets Pony.ai robotaxis "in the coming weeks," whatever that means. Also Wayve. Also potentially others.

Spreading bets this wide stops looking like a plan at some point and starts looking like nobody knows which horse wins.

Hourcar ran nonprofit carsharing in the Twin Cities for years, which is already a tough business model before you add "and also we're running out of money." Now it's wrapping up. Turns out goodwill and a mission statement don't cover fleet maintenance and parking. The cities that were supposed to be built for this kind of service — dense, transit-friendly, sustainability-minded — still couldn't generate enough trips to keep the math alive. Carsharing remains a great idea that keeps not quite working.

Somewhere there's a fleet manager staring at six different dashboards that don't talk to each other, and Inspiration Fleet would like to sell them a seventh that talks to all of them. That's genuinely the pitch, and honestly it's not a bad one — the fragmentation problem in fleet data is real and slightly absurd at this point.

Whether "vendor-agnostic AI platform" turns out to mean actual flexibility or just a new kind of lock-in with better branding is the part nobody knows yet.

There's a specific kind of rage that happens when you've booked a midsize SUV, show up at the counter, and get handed keys to something that technically has four wheels and a roof. Rental companies have spent years treating the vehicle category as a vague suggestion. Customers increasingly haven't. Loyalty, repeat bookings, complaints — they all trace back to whether the actual car matched the actual expectation. Apparently "or similar" still means something different to the person paying.

The EU already slapped tariffs on Chinese EVs, so doing the same for hybrids feels like the natural next move. Which is fine, except European manufacturers spent the last decade not building affordable hybrids people actually wanted, and now the solution is to make the cheaper ones more expensive. Classic.

Twenty years of nonprofit carsharing in the Twin Cities, and what ends it is a $625,000 gap in a $5 million budget. Not a bad idea, not bad execution — insurance costs went up, federal grants got pulled, and the cities that technically owned the Evie electric network apparently couldn't find the money either. The whole thing closes October 15th.

Four thousand members, twenty-two staff, and a board that ran the numbers Tuesday night and decided that was that.