Car Rental Council of Ireland
CRCI
The Car Rental Council of Ireland is the representative trade association of businesses in the car rental industry in Ireland.
ID: 675011092393-57
Lobbying Activity
Response to Clean corporate vehicles
6 Sept 2025
The Car Rental Council of Ireland (CRCI) represents all of Irelands major car rental companies. Members also operate Irelands key car sharing businesses. Council members recognise their responsibility in helping to reduce overall transport emissions. While the car rental industry in Ireland is particularly reliant on tourism, it also serves a wide range of SME and State sectors. The uptake of battery EVs (BEVs) in the Irish rental and car sharing fleets is severely constrained by shortcomings in several key enabling conditions, the fundamental one being a lack of consumer demand. Rental utilisation rates for BEVs, i.e. the % of time a vehicle is actively rented out, were as low as 24% in 2024 when 80% is the break-even point. In order to overcome this consumer resistance, the CRCI believes that several other enabling conditions must be addressed: 1. Charging infrastructure, particularly chargers for tourists. A long-term strategy needs to go well beyond AFIR and address deployment in both urban centres and rural areas, at airports and train stations. 2. Total cost of ownership, including ongoing issues with depreciation, due to problems with: o Demand in the second-hand car market. o Trust among consumers regarding battery life. 3. Car recharging experience. The recharging experience needs to be as seamless as refuelling an ICE vehicle today by ensuring ease of finding reliable public charge points, more user-friendly payment options and price transparency, all supported by adequate grid capacity. 4. Regulatory stability. Both for new and used vehicles, rental and purchase, it is ultimately the customer that decides on the choice of vehicle, not car rental companies. The EU is currently assessing three policy options: Policy Option 1 Setting of national targets. The CRCI opposes setting of national targets which, in turn, would inevitably be followed up with targets imposed by Member States on fleet companies. In practice this option would differ little from policy option 3. Instead of mandating such targets, the CRCI supports well-designed fiscal incentive systems paired with heavy investment in accessible charging infrastructure to naturally enable and foster demand for BEVs in primary and secondary markets. Policy Option 2 Rules on financial incentives for corporate vehicles. These should be designed to reproduce the incentives systems that have been adopted across the fastest BEV uptake markets in Europe. Even in these markets, consumer demand for second-hand cars is low. As such, incentives should support demand for the secondary as well as primary vehicle markets. Policy Option 3 Targets for companies. Such targets would not address the existing enabling conditions outlined above. The introduction of company targets without addressing these, risks forcing a scale-down of rental offerings, which will have a major impact on the Irish regional tourism industry and on SMEs which depend on our services, as well as having implications for the wider automotive ecosystem. This would not only reduce the competitiveness of European industry, but it would also fail to meet the stated environmental objective as business and consumers are likely to favour older more polluting vehicles and drive them longer. From a legal perspective, we consider the Proposal, notably policy options 1 and 3, not to be compliant with EU law as it is likely to violate the Principles of Proportionality and Consistency of legislation and the Principle of Subsidiarity; and to directly infringe Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, including the Freedom to Conduct a Business. Rather than arbitrarily setting targets for corporate fleets that fail to take into account real world limitations, the CRCI believes the Commission should focus on investment in charging infrastructure, adequate grid capacity and subsidies/fiscal incentives designed to help consumers and businesses bridge the financing gap, for both the new and used BEV markets.
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