Can sales to car rental agencies save the US Automakers if they were to restock their fleets? Well that is not likely unless the US Automakers can sell them high-mileage cars, which is what most customers are asking for these days. In fact it use to be that the car rental agencies gave discounts for smaller cars and now they may have to rethink that. Does it makes sense for US Automakers to offer deep incentives and financing to car rental corporations to sell more cars for 2006 to help them get back on their feet? Well today the big three US Automakers have been divesting their associations with the rental car world. As the Ford grandson said recently on national TV "We are divesting our selves of all non-core businesses" in 2001. Some of the top car rental car companies are franchised; Budget and Avis. Budget has both company owned units and in smaller markets franchisees and most airport locations are owned by the company and most non-airport agencies are actually franchisees. This can cause problems for the customer who wishes to return a car in another location, which was rented from a franchisee. But all in all it works well. Avis has franchisees and company owned units, which operate in a similar status. Budget has a rent-a-truck division too, most of which are franchisees. Remember Budget was once affiliated with Sears and Ford. Now it stands alone. Ford once owned shares of Hertz. Why is this important? Well most franchisees will have their choice in which cars they buy, so it will be more difficult for Auto Makers to make large across the board incentives, although they would be well advised to try and thus help revive the US Automakers and bring some of those 60,000 laid off workers back to work. Consider all this in 2006. |
