DETROIT — General Motors plans to keep reducing the flow of vehicles from its plants to U.S. rental lots at least through 2018, continuing a strategy that has helped the automaker's North American operations pile up more than $26 billion in profits under CEO Mary Barra even as its overall market share keeps sliding.
Alan Batey, GM's president of North America, told Automotive News last week that sales to daily-rental fleets would fall by about 50,000 units this year and an unspecified amount in 2018. That would represent four straight years of declines for GM's rental deliveries, which already dropped from 16.1 percent of its total U.S. sales in 2014 to 11.7 percent in 2016, according to R.L. Polk registration data provided by the company. The additional reductions Batey discussed likely would drop that proportion into single digits.