Rental car companies registered around 779,000 new vehicles in the first half of 2024. This 24% increase over the same period last year is an indication the market is getting back to normal – though not quite as far back as the first half of 2019, when 1.1 million vehicles were added to rental fleets across Europe.
Car rental prices are falling, another indication the market is returning to normal, notes Dataforce, which collected figures on rental registrations from 20 European countries.
The largest market for new rental vehicle registrations in the first half of this year was Germany (around 190,000 units), followed by Spain (152,000), France (132,000), the UK (95,000) and Italy (84,000).
These Big Five markets represent 84% of the registrations tallied up by the vehicle data specialists. The others are Denmark and the Netherlands (both 17,000), Sweden (16,000), Belgium, Switzerland, and Norway (all 10,000), Austria (9,000), Portugal (8,000) and Poland (7,000), Finland (5,000), Iceland and Czechia (both 4,000), Lithuania (3,000), and Latvia and Slovakia (both 2,000).
The rise is thanks to a return to stability in the supply chain, which has allowed OEMs to refocus on short-term rental customers. The robust performance of the rental car industry means that 1 in 10 vehicles registered in Europe in the first half of this year was a rental.
As a major holiday destination, Spain has the highest rental penetration, with one in four vehicles registered in the country being a rental car. Spain is the fifth-largest car market overall, but the second-largest rental car market, behind Germany.
The biggest relative increase in rental registrations was noted in the UK, where they went up 111% year-on-year.
Another notable evolution: the shrinkage of the share of BEVs in rental registrations, which declined from 6.4% in the first half of 2023 to 3.8% in the same period this year (or a total of just under 30,000).
Two major factors explain the impopularity of electrics in the rental industry. For one, customer demand is low, due to unfamiliarity with electric driving, anxieties about range and charging, and questions about whether and how to bring back the vehicle ‘full’. The other major drawback: due to uncertainty around residual values, rental companies are forced to charge relatively high prices for EV rentals, reducing both their appetite to offer the option, and customer demand for a rental EV.
Most (57.3%) of the rental cars registered in H1 2024 are still petrol, followed by diesel (26.9%), mild hybrids (6.1%), plug-in hybrids (4.8%), and only then battery-electrics (3.8%).
Image: formulanone/Flickr – CC BY-SA 2.0
