This week in car rental & carsharing

Waymo called its Uber partnership "a bit of a crapshoot" — which is a surprisingly honest thing to say about a deal you signed. The problem was simple: book a robotaxi on Uber, maybe get a human driver instead. Not exactly the seamless autonomous future anyone had in mind.

So starting 2028, Waymo goes solo in Austin and Atlanta. Uber, formerly the distribution partner, becomes the competition. Funny how scale does that.

The EU Parliament's environment committee just voted to ease CO2 targets for carmakers. Which is basically the committee that's supposed to care about emissions deciding the emissions rules were a bit much. The auto industry has been lobbying hard on this for months, so at least someone got what they wanted. Whether it's the planet is a separate question.

Fleet costs are up, pricing power is down, and apparently "mobility competition" is now the polite way to say Uber ate your lunch. Avis Budget had a rough third quarter — revenue slipped, profits slipped harder. The car rental business used to be a cozy oligopoly with captive airport customers. Now there are apps, there are rideshares, there are carsharing schemes, and apparently people have options. Who allowed this.

Chinese battery makers keep widening the gap. CATL and BYD together now account for the kind of global market share that makes everyone else look like a rounding error, and the trend isn't slowing. For car rental fleets quietly building out EV capacity — or trying to — that means more and more of the vehicles coming down the pipeline run on Chinese cells whether the press release mentions it or not.

Nobody's particularly alarmed. It's just quietly becoming the default.

Cabify adding 320 electric Škodas to its fleet sounds like exactly the kind of number a press team rounds to feel significant. It's not nothing, but it's also not a transformation. Ride-hailing electrification tends to look better in the announcement than in the charging queue at 2am when the next driver needs the car. Still, Škoda Elroq is a reasonable choice — mid-range, practical, not trying too hard. We'll see if the grid agrees.

The used EV market was already having a rough time, and now it has to compete with new cars that manufacturers are discounting hard enough to make buying used feel like a weird lifestyle choice. If a new one is barely more expensive than a two-year-old one, the residual math collapses fast. For rental fleets that bought EVs at peak prices and need to offload them, that's a genuinely uncomfortable place to be right now.

Uber just announced $10 billion to get 2,000 robotaxis running by 2027. Waymo already has 4,000 on the road today, targeting 20,000 by that same deadline. So Uber's big autonomous moment arrives right when Waymo laps them twice.

Also: Waymo is quietly ending its exclusivity deal with Uber in 2028. Turns out lending your best asset to a competitor has a shelf life.

Somebody built an AI marketplace for premium car rentals and announced it at a travel trade show, which is the correct venue for things that sound impressive and ship later. The pitch is familiar: connect luxury fleet owners with high-end customers, cut friction, let the algorithm do the matchmaking. Fine. The premium segment is real, the inefficiency is real. Whether "AI-powered marketplace" means anything beyond a decent search filter remains, as always, a question for twelve months from now.