Chart Of The Day: America's Top Rental Cars
Courtesy of the New York Times and Polk, a chart showing the top rental cars in 2013, as a percentage of overall sales.
A big question mark overall is “what percentage of Impala sales (not just to fleets) are of the W-Body, fleet only, ‘Impala Limited'”? GM won’t break out their numbers from the Epsilon II-based model that replaced it, but either way, at least half of the Impala’s volume (roughly 156,000 units were sold in 2013) went to rental fleets. The Impala and the Dodge Charger, two heavy hitters in the ever-shrinking full-size car segment, are well represented, along with the Chrysler minivans, the now defunct Dodge Avenger and GM’s full-size SUVs. Mazda also appears to be dumping volume into daily rental, with the Mazda2 and Mazda5 making an appearance.
Ranking ahead of the Impala was the Toyota Yaris. Even though nearly 60 percent of Yarisis (Yari?) go to rental fleets, Toyota just spent what must have been a huge sum of money flying journalists and their guest of choice to a week-long drive event in Hawaii to preview the new Yaris, as well as the Sienna and refreshed 2015 Camry. TTAC was not invited, but perhaps we can do two rental reviews, for less than the cost of one night’s stay on the Big Island.
More by Derek Kreindler
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This is purely an anecdotal observation on my part but I have been seeing a lot of Suburbans and Yukons around here with black paint, tinted windows, and livery plates. It seems they are the choice in the chauffer business to replace the old Panther platform Town Cars, at least in Denver anyways.
Amazing to see that if you want the hot 'in demand' CUV category you end up with a Captiva foisted on your unhappy soul. Essentially a 2008 Saturn Vue, which was not half bad in its day, this is now an underpowered dinosaur. You would think that with these kind of numbers GM has paid for all the $ they invested in this turd.
Nice to see some data since according to the loudest TTAC commentariat the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord are the most common rental cars. Usually this is mixed in with great nuggets of wisdom like "AWD doesn't help in snow" Wonder if they even had Honda numbers since they do no "official" fleet sales maybe it is the biggest fleet seller.
This could be, quite possibly, the most boring article on this site to date. Is there REALLY that little going on to the point where this is necessary? I'm shocked that there were any comments on this; I guess we're all getting accustomed to the latest crop of boring posts. Maybe Hooniverse has something good today...