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Driverless vehicles are expected to become a massive global industry, and the car rental companies want their piece of it.

This spring, Hertz Global Holdings launched Oro, a company focusing on fleet management, logistics and vehicle maintenance, with an emphasis on autonomous vehicles (AVs). Hertz CFO Scott Haralson said Oro “has the potential to be the most valuable asset in our platform.” 

Oro’s first partner is no small fish. The company is teaming up with Uber, providing repairs, charging, cleaning and overall management of Uber’s driverless fleet; the rideshare company has an order book of 35,000 vehicles. 

Hertz CEO Gil West said that AVs have the potential to unlock a multitrillion-dollar market, and Hertz wants to stake its claim. 

“We’re strengthening our core business and innovating for the future, all while furthering our mission to advance the way the world moves,” he said. 

Hertz is the latest but not the first car rental company to forge into driverless vehicles. 

Last summer, Avis Budget Group secured an agreement to provide fleet management in Dallas for Waymo, the industry leader in AVs. Other cities are under consideration.

Enterprise Mobility, parent of the Enterprise, National and Alamo brands, likely isn’t far behind Hertz and Avis Budget. Enterprise has begun testing various driverless-vehicle applications with companies across the globe. 

Sixt is active, as well. Chief commercial officer Nils Hueske said that the Germany-based company is in discussions with many big names in AV manufacturing and technology. Sixt could launch a partnership before the end of the year, he added. 

“Could we survive without it? I believe so, but we don’t want to,” Hueske said. “It’s definitely a field that we want to get into; it fits very well with our focus on technology.”

Market-leading San Francisco

Not only are driverless vehicles likely to be a huge part of the future of ground transportation, they are increasingly its present.

In areas of San Francisco where driverless vehicles are allowed, Waymo now has a larger ridesharing market share than Lyft, analytics company YipitData said. 

San Francisco has emerged as an early epicenter for driverless vehicles. Amazon-owned Zoox, whose purpose-built driverless vehicles don’t have steering wheels or gas or brake pedals, is currently in a pilot phase there. Uber’s driverless operations, in partnership with Oro, are slated to begin in San Francisco this year using the Lucid-manufactured Gravity SUV and Nuro’s autonomous-driving technology. 

Los Angeles, Phoenix and Miami are other early driverless-vehicle hubs in the U.S. Waymo is now operating commercially in 11 U.S. cities and has announced plans for 21 more cities, including London and Tokyo. 

Driverless deployments are rolling out around the world, with particular concentration in China, where Baidu is a market leader in vehicle manufacturing and operation, said Vik Krishnan, a transport-focused partner for consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

In a January report, McKinsey projected a mass deployment of driverless robotaxis by 2030 in urban areas across North America, Asia and Europe. The consulting firm also projects widespread pilot deployments of privately operated, fully driverless vehicles by 2032 in urban areas of Asia and North America. 

In September, Mingyu Guan, who leads McKinsey’s automotive team in China, predicted that within 10 to 15 years there will be no need for driver’s licenses. 

“The vehicles will make sure that we are safely moving from point A to point B without worrying about anything on the road, so we can focus on more productive stuff that, as human beings, we can uniquely contribute,” he said in an interview posted to the McKinsey website.  

While that prediction may prove to be fanciful, a September 2025 analysis by Bank of America Institute, leveraging data from BloombergNEF, projected that the AV car market will be $700 billion by 2040 as driverless vehicles reach a critical mass and the number of privately owned vehicles peak. 

“High adoption could significantly reduce total cars on the road if they’re able to be accessed cheaply, reliably and on demand, increasing the share of higher-utilized shared vehicles at the expense of privately owned vehicles,” Bank of America said. 

BloombergNEF, the report said, projects that the number of cars in the world could peak by 2035, even while global miles traveled by car continue to climb steadily, driven by increasing use of robotaxis and shared AVs. 

AV rental opportunities

For car rental companies, projections like those spell opportunity, provided they make the transition. 

Fleet management could be just the start. Eventually, driverless cars may offer a bevy of business opportunities.

Imagine a car rental experience in which the driverless car meets you where you ask it, enabling you to skip the rental counter. Then, when you’re done with the rental, the vehicle drives itself back to the service center.

That vision, Hueske said, could become an industry reality in select cities in as soon as three to five years, though it would likely begin as a premium service. Driverless vehicle ownership is also likely in the car rental industry’s future. 

Dan Wessell, Enterprise’s senior vice president of strategic initiatives, said that the company already owns semiautonomous vehicles globally. 

“We anticipate Enterprise Mobility will become one of the world’s largest owners and operators of autonomous vehicles and play a key role in introducing AVs to customers and business partners,” he said. 

Avis Budget CEO Brian Choi delivered a similar message when he discussed the Waymo partnership during the company’s Q2 earnings call last year. 

“We are not opposed to putting our balance sheet to work. We buy billions of dollars of fleet every single year. We’re good at it,” Choi said.

Car rental companies could also get into the package-delivery business, deploying driverless vehicles to assist UPS, Amazon and Federal Express, said Chris Woronka, a Deutsche Bank investment analyst who follows the leisure travel sector, including the car rental companies.  

Brief rentals of just a couple of hours could also be facilitated, with AVs  driving themselves back to conveniently located service centers for a quick turnaround.

“Companies are actively preparing. They’re talking, they’re negotiating, they’re figuring out business models,” Woronka said. “There is going to be news on this monthly and quarterly.”

Set up for success

Fleet management is a natural entry point for car rental companies because they already have robust infrastructure networks near airports and in city centers that AV rideshare startups will need.

West said Hertz has a global network of 11,000 service locations and car washes to accompany its thousands of maintenance technicians and 2,700-plus EV chargers. 

Choi said that in Dallas alone, Avis Budget has more than 50 sites maintained by dozens of technicians and staffed by more than 500 employees. 

Whether there’s a driver or not, cars will always need to be serviced and cleaned.

“I can guarantee you that into the future, no matter how advanced the technology gets, it is a mathematical certainty that someone will leave a half-eaten granola bar in the cup holder. That’s why service infrastructure and the human touch still matter,” Choi said. 

As car rental companies monetize fleet management for driverless vehicles, they’ll also gain valuable experience to help them transition to AV ownership. 

“By managing both driver-led and driverless vehicles, we’re widening our scope and deepening our experience with more complex and dynamic fleets, testing and refining economics, asset utilization and workforce models so we will be ready for the transition to scaled autonomy, at whatever pace that occurs,” West said. 

Fleet management is one of three vectors of opportunity McKinsey’s Krishnan foresees for car rental companies in the AV space. Another is data collection. Rental vehicles are driven constantly, and at scale, just about anywhere a car can go. That gives rental companies the opportunity to gather and sell data to Waymo and other AV companies, which will want to make data-backed decisions about vehicle usage.

Another opportunity, naturally, will be renting driverless cars to customers. 

Both Krishnan and Woronka said AVs will offer a variety of rental strategies, including ones that large rental companies don’t currently deploy. 

They’ll still rent out vehicles in blocks of a day and longer. But shorter rental times, perhaps just a couple of hours, will become an easier option with reduced reliance on rental centers and faster turnaround times because cars drive themselves to and from service centers.

Car rental companies could also explore their own rideshare operations. 

“The business model can and will evolve,” Woronka said. 

He said he expects the evolution to be slow for the remainder of this decade, then accelerate after 2030. 

Another potential strategy, said Krishnan, will be for companies to rent out driverless vehicles to customers only when they need the vehicle, leaving it free to serve other customers or perform other tasks when it’s not needed. 

A business model like that could involve the renter using the same car repeatedly or paying a one-time fee for priority pick-up over the period of the rental — a sort of short-term subscription robotaxi service.

Trial and error will ultimately determine successful pricing strategies and business models, the analysts said. 

Similar to Hertz and Avis, Hueske said he envisions Sixt’s AV progression beginning with fleet-management services in a specific location. Over three to five years, he expects Sixt to scale a fleet-management operation to a number of cities. He said deployment of driverless rentals is achievable in around five years. 

“This is not set in stone,” Hueske said. “It really depends on how quickly the technology will evolve, how quickly customer demand grows and how quickly the costs come down.”