Illinois governor vetoes bill meant to cripple rental car competition

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Entrenched businesses do not like disruptive new competitors. Perhaps that's a simplistic generalization, but it certainly seems to be the case in a fight between the rental car industry and car sharing platforms like Turo and Maven. On Tuesday afternoon, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner vetoed a bill that would have crippled the operations of the peer-to-peer car sharing companies in the state by adding large taxes to those who rented or loaned their cars through such services.

The bill in question started life uncontroversially, changing some rules about damage waivers and rental cars. But late in the legislative session, amendments written by lobbyists for Enterprise Rent-A-Car radically altered its meaning.

Illinois currently applies a five-percent tax to car rentals, with extra local taxes of up to 20 percent in cities like Chicago to pay for local bond issues for things like the convention center. The amendments changed the bill such that all those taxes would now apply to peer-to-peer car sharing, as well as requiring companies like Turo, Maven, and GetAround to comply with regulations about font sizes, physical premises design, having humans to physically inspect driver's licenses, and other rules that make no sense given the distributed nature of Internet-enabled peer-to-peer car sharing.

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