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News - MazdaMazda Australia gently pursuing rental, fleet salesGovernment, corporate and rental sales in Mazda’s sights, but resale is a factor26 May 2025 By TOM BAKER MAZDA has looked past its long-held aversion to fleet sales in Australia, expanding its in-house fleet sales team, bolstering fleet ordering support for dealers nationally, and gently pursuing deals while keeping an eye on customer resale values – which remains a controlling priority.
While Mazda Australia (MA) head office is concentrating on securing federal and state government business, dealers are being tasked with approaching large corporate customers in their area of responsibility.
Australians wandering through airport carparks in recent months might have noticed that MA is also entertaining some – but not all – approaches from rental car companies, with large hirer Europcar now stocking Mazda’s ageing CX-3 small SUVs at many locations.
Other late-lifecycle Mazda models spotted in rental fleets include the CX-5 medium SUV while the Mazda 3 small passenger car – the current generation of which is now into its sixth year since launch – is also available.
MA national manager of product and business strategy Daniel Wakelam briefed GoAuto on Mazda’s developing philosophy in relation to fleet sales.
“It is a deliberate strategy. Mazda in the past didn’t do fleet or rental. We are doing a bit more now, but it is balanced in proportion to the market. We don’t want to damage resale values, so we will keep (the proportion of fleet sales) at a level which protects that,” Mr Wakelam said.
In analysing market conditions before lifting what was effectively an embargo in recent decades on fleet sales (beyond the ute segment), Mr Wakelam said Mazda had assessed the way in which Toyota manages fleet sales.
“You see brands like Toyota who have done (considerable fleet sales). Their resale values are still good. It doesn’t damage you if you do it properly, but you can’t go out and do half your volume as rental. Then you are damaging your brand and resale. We don’t want that. Resale is very strong for us, and we want to keep that way,” Mr Wakelam noted.
While rental cars are particularly visible to leisure and business travellers (as well as the insurance industry), rental car sales have made up only around five per cent of the total new car market so far in 2025 – and the proportion of Mazda sales to rental firms is understood to be less than that, as part of what Mr Wakelam called a “reasonably low” target for fleet sales for MA.
“Pretty much all of (MA’s rental sales are) the CX-3,” Mr Wakelam said, noting that rental car firms have approached MA with proposed purchases of other models in the range – including the firm’s CX-60 upper-midsize SUV.
Mr Wakelam indicated that one possible impediment to Mazda doing additional rental car sales is that it is not willing to discount as steeply as some others – nor is it willing to sell in large volumes, in order to prevent “thousands” of Mazdas being dumped onto the second-hand market simultaneously.
“If we were doing a CX-60 rental, it would probably be a ($53,990 driveaway) Pure,” said Mr Wakelam.
“Rental (firms) want the cheapest car all the time, so they’ll go the lowest grade. We are not trashing the price to sell to rentals. We are doing a reasonable business. If they want ridiculous discounts, we are not interested.”
More palatable to Mazda in relation to fleet sales of the CX-60 – and its other more premium products – is burgeoning demand from large corporations for plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) that can meet corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets that increasingly scrutinise the CO2 emissions of company cars.
“There are companies that want PHEVs for their own environmental targets,” Mr Wakelam said.
“They naturally come to this sort of car. They have ESG targets and a CO2 target and (CX-60 PHEV) will fit more perfectly than a full hybrid, because the sticker figure is what is important to them. They want, on paper, to have very low CO2, and that is what these have.”
Most sales of the Mazda BT-50 ute – which shares its chassis and mechanicals with the Isuzu D-Max – are fleet, though a large share of these deals are from small businesses that technically fall into the fleet box though share more in common with retail transactions.
Meanwhile, a focus at MA is ensuring Mazda models are increasingly approved to sit on Australian federal and state government vehicle lists – meaning they are allowed to be purchased by government departments.
“You have to be on the government list to sell to government. The discount amount doesn’t matter so much, but they can’t buy a car not on the list,” Mr Wakelam said.
“We are not on all the lists around Australia at the moment – we are trying to get onto them. Some states we are on, but every state has its own list and there are local government lists that tend to be done area-by-area.”
The outgoing Mazda 6 medium passenger car secured its place on the federal government’s vehicle list, and stock of low-end variants of the sedan were sold directly by MA to the Australian Defence Force.
“We did a big deal with Defence for some Mazda 6s,” Mr Wakelam said. “I’m not sure how much else we have done – but we have been looking.”  Read more |
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