This week in car rental & carsharing

The EU finally blinked. After years of "2035, internal combustion is dead, no exceptions", a committee just voted to soften the CO₂ targets for carmakers. Not scrap them — just... make them a bit less uncomfortable for now.

Rental fleets were already quietly dreading the mandate. A hard cutoff sounds clean on paper; replacing hundreds of thousands of petrol cars with EVs that customers still don't fully trust is a different conversation.

Kia is running a pilot in South Korea where the cars move around without a driver — remotely operated, returned to you wherever, no human shuffling vehicles between spots. It's genuinely interesting tech wrapped in the usual "future of mobility" language. Whether it scales beyond a controlled trial in a market that's unusually friendly to this kind of thing is a different question nobody's rushing to answer yet.

London's been talking about cleaning up its taxi sector for years, and now there's a proposal floating around that would require new ride-hailing licences to be battery-electric only. Which sounds decisive until you remember that charging infrastructure across the city is still a bit of a postcode lottery, and drivers are the ones absorbing the cost of the switch. Good ambition. The math for someone working twelve-hour shifts is a separate conversation nobody's quite finished yet.

Avis billed a Canadian renter for driving roughly 29,000 km in seven days. That's not a rounding error — that's three-quarters of the way around the planet. The guy's iPhone logged 1,400 km including hiking. Avis called it a "data entry error" and offered a refund, but only after a TV news segment got involved. Credit card dispute went nowhere. Months of the customer's time, gone.

"We are reinforcing our procedures" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that apology.

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1.46 million people had their ID documents leak out of a Japanese carsharing platform, and the company's response was to offer each of them ¥3,000 — about €12. That's roughly the cost of a mediocre airport coffee and a bottle of water. Your passport scans, your driver's licence, your personal data — all apparently wandering somewhere outside the system since September. But here's ¥3,000, sorry about that.

Hertz is trading at under two dollars a share, carrying roughly $17.5 billion in debt, bleeding free cash flow, and their big strategic bet is... letting people take a used car home for three days before buying it. Which is actually fine as an idea. It's just a strange hill to plant a flag on when the house is on fire.

The stock dropped on the announcement, then jumped anyway. Classic HTZ at this point.