For years, car rental companies assumed that the cars they rent will affect the cars that ultimately their customers will buy. Heck, it is one of the reasons car manufacturers owned most of the rental firms. A new Avis survey taken in Britain has confirmed those assumptions.
The poll indicated that almost half of the people renting cars were planning to purchase a new car within a year. Carrentals.co.uk reported that, “Of all the drivers surveyed in the UK, almost half said they were ‘slightly or much more likely’ to consider buying the car they had most recently rented, while 44 percent planned on a car they had recently hired.”
The survey also suggested that the average rental car is driven by 105 drivers. That’s a lot of advertising that the car manufacturers are getting after selling their cars to the car rental companies.
I’ll bet the next round of negotiations between rental company buyers and automobile manufacturers will have a new economic reality coming into play. And I expect to see fewer SUVs — and more hybrids — in rental fleets.
