America's Biggest Rental Car Company Is Lobbying to Drive Away Competitors

The first time New Hampshire State Rep. Sherman Packard (R–Rockingham) heard of the car-sharing startup Turo, it was from a lobbyist.

- Eric Boehm

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Packard says, has a “huge footprint in my community. So they called me up and said, ‘Hey, let’s be fair about this.’” To the Enterprise lobbyists, being fair meant forcing Turo—which is basically Airbnb, but for your car—to pay a 9 percent tax, the same one the state charges on hotel rooms, meals, and other tourist expenses, including rental cars. (New Hampshire has no general sales tax.)

The appeal to fairness worked. In January, Packard introduced a bill in the state legislature that would tax and regulate businesses like Turo as if they were rental car companies. Enterprise and its lobbyists had won.

That may seem like a routine dispute between a state government and a disruptive new technology that doesn’t easily fit in existing boxes for tax and regulatory purposes. But Packard’s bill is just one small part of a national effort by traditional rental car companies to use their political clout against a newcomer that threatens the old business model.

It’s a fight that’s still happening mostly behind the scenes—at statehouses, in courthouses, and within airport authorities. But it could explode into the mainstream as the peer-to-peer rental model expands beyond Turo and its immediate competitors (see: Maven, Getaround). And at the center of the effort to stunt the competition is the same company that first reached out to Packard: Enterprise Rent-A-Car.