This week in car rental & carsharing

So Tesla and Turo teamed up so you can rent a car that drives itself — supervised, meaning you still have to watch it the whole time. Which is basically just driving, with extra anxiety. Out of 10 million Teslas sold, 1.7 million owners actually paid for FSD, and apparently that number is climbing fast. Whether renting strangers a demo ride through someone else's car is a real adoption strategy or just a very expensive test drive program dressed up as a partnership — genuinely unclear.

Waymo has been bolting its self-driving kit onto Jaguar I-Paces and Zeekr minivans, which was already a fairly odd combination. Now Toyota's joining the party, building bZ crossovers straight off a regular production line in Japan — Waymo hardware included — with testing starting in 2027. After that, apparently the UK. No numbers, no firm timeline beyond that, just vibes and a co-CEO quote.

Hyundai made a similar promise about "tens of thousands" of Waymo robotaxis from its Georgia plant. Still waiting on those.

Avis apparently decided that paying Verra Mobility for toll and violation processing was negotiable, and now Verra is staring at a revenue gap. Losing one big rental client hits differently when that client was basically a cornerstone of your business model.

The funny part is that Verra's whole pitch is frictionless fleet services for rental companies. When the rental company decides friction is cheaper, that's a rough day for the pitch deck.

Ayvens is blaming the used car market for their numbers, which is fair enough — residual values doing unexpected things does hurt a leasing company in very specific ways. Though it's also the kind of explanation that sounds clean and external and neatly avoids questions about how the fleet was priced to begin with.

Used car prices move. Everyone in this business knew that after 2021. "We got surprised" is getting harder to say with a straight face.

Avis loyalty program now works at two more airports. That's the whole announcement. Heathrow and CDG, both very large, both very airport-y, both presumably already full of Avis cars. Hard to know what took so long, but here we are. If you collect points renting cars in Europe, the list of eligible locations just got slightly longer. File accordingly.

Turo moved its headquarters into the old Macy's men's store on Union Square. Which is a very San Francisco sentence — a struggling department store gives way to a car-sharing platform that doesn't own any cars, in a neighborhood that's been quietly falling apart for years. The symbolism basically writes itself, and nobody in the press release seemed to notice.