Enterprise Holdings, the company behind the Enterprise Rent-A-Car brand, aims to add between 50 and 100 vehicles to its car-sharing service within 18 months and hire 100 more people within a year as it drives further expansion across rural Ireland.

In 2021, the company launched Enterprise Car Club in Ireland, enabling drivers to rent one of 22 vehicles nationwide for an hour or a day via an app. The car club now has more than 1,000 members and 50 vehicles. Enterprise, which added branches in Tallaght and at Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre last year, also plans to open a daily rental branch with a car club in Castlebar in the next two months, Brendan Grieve, managing director of Enterprise’s Irish operations, told the Sunday Independent.

"We plan to grow pretty aggressively in Ireland over the next 12 to 24 months through both car clubs and car rentals,” he said. 

‘We don’t have as many vehicles as we’d like to support the increased demand’

The company has just opened a car club location in Cavan town, and serves other regional towns such as Athlone, Wexford, and Kilkenny. It has entered into a partnership with ESB to provide an electric vehicle in Leitrim to local committees, offering services such as taking patients to hospital appointments, a model that could be rolled out to the rest of rural Ireland if it proves successful, Grieve said.

Enterprise’s growth will be partly determined by its ability to acquire EVs and other types of vehicles as the global motor industry strives to recover from a shortage. That shortage led to a surge in rental prices for tourists last summer, a scenario that Grieve didn’t rule out for the 2023 summer tourism season.

"We don’t have as many vehicles as we’d like to support the increased demand that will come during the holiday season, though supply has been a little bit better this year,” he said. "Our rental business is very much focused on supporting our long-term contracted (business) customers, so they’ll be our priority.”

Reporting: The Irish Independent