A 95% location rate in 2026: what Geotab brings to rental, leasing and mobility fleets

Every fleet operator knows the call. A branch reports that a car didn't come back, or a customer says it's gone from where they left it. From that point the operator needs one thing first: the vehicle's location.

Geotab data helped major European rental and leasing operators locate over 95% of the vehicles reported stolen from their fleets in 2026. In one case, a vehicle was located within 41 minutes of the theft being reported, while in another case, Geotab's proprietary method located a high-value vehicle even after its licence plate and VIN had been counterfeited.

Across the wider recovery log, Geotab-located vehicles carry an estimated combined market-entry value of more than €1M.

Why leasing and rental fleets are hard to cover

Leasing and rental fleets are about as mixed as fleets get. A single operator can have cars from many manufacturers, bought at different times, registered in different countries and moved between branches as demand shifts. A location service has to work across all of that, because theft doesn't follow the fleet plan.

Vehicles stolen in one country have also turned up in another, so a service that stops at a national border leaves a gap exactly where it's needed.

That's why we've invested so much into OEM relationships. Geotab works with more than 90% of the leading vehicle manufacturers (by fleet market share), and many of the vehicles located in these cases were connected through OEM connections. Where a vehicle is connected through its manufacturer, Geotab can use that connection across a wide range of makes and models, alongside the devices we install ourselves.

Geotab connects over 6 million vehicles and assets worldwide and processes 100 billion data points a day, and our proprietary AI threat-detection models run on that data. How we combine it all is what sets our approach apart. We share the details with customers and keep it out of public view, so that the methods stay effective against those who would try to get around them.

Where stolen vehicle recovery fits

Geotab's stolen vehicle recovery service draws on all of this. It combines factory signals with independent tracking running on separate channels, so a vehicle that has lost one source of location data can still be found through another. Despite the name, the service finds vehicles rather than retrieving them: once an operator has the location, its own team, a local solution partner, a secure operation centre  or the police go and recover the car.

Working with the industry

Industry-wide standards for vehicle data are close to our heart. We believe harmonised data is what lets fleets work across makes, models and markets, which is why Geotab has been a member of COVESA Open in new window, the Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance, since 2020. Christoph Ludewig, our Global Vice President, OEM, sits on its board, bringing more than 25 years of fleet telematics experience and a strong focus on collaboration between vehicle manufacturers and the fleet industry.

COVESA brings automakers and technology companies together to agree common approaches to connected vehicle systems, including the Vehicle Signal Specification, a shared way of describing vehicle data. As a telematics provider that depends on manufacturers' connected systems, we want to help shape that work.

The same data runs the rest of the rental cycle

Location is only one of the things rental teams need from vehicle data. Large rental operators now run connected vehicle data across tens of thousands of vehicles and several European markets. Before that, staff checked mileage, fuel and vehicle details by hand at every rental and return. Now the information comes through automatically.

With that information, teams can see which vehicles are approaching service mileage and plan servicing and resale around it. They can position vehicles ahead of the rentals they expect, and charge customers accurately for the fuel owed when a vehicle comes back, which wasn't possible before.

Other rental and mobility operators use the platform in their own ways. Europcar Mobility Group uses connected vehicle data to locate stolen vehicles, receive theft alerts and monitor maintenance needs, fuel levels and EV charge. Moove Cars, which runs a private hire fleet of more than 4,000 vehicles, reported a 30.79% improvement in fuel consumption and estimated annual savings of more than £3 million. Those are separate deployments with their own results, built on the same platform.

For more on how we protect fleets against professional theft networks, including why a single layer of tracking leaves a gap, read Christoph Ludewig's piece on the architecture gap behind Europe's vehicle theft crisis.