Sustainability Analytics and Carbon Footprint Reduction in U.S. Car Rental Fleet Operations: A Natural Resource-Based View and Human Capital Theory Analysis

This paper examines sustainability analytics adoption as the independent variable and fleet carbon footprint reduction as the dependent variable in United States car rental fleet operations, with fuel efficiency per vehicle as a secondary dependent variable. The United States transportation sector accounts for approximately 28 percent of total national greenhouse gas emissions, making it the single largest contributing sector. Car rental fleets are an operationally concentrated segment of road transportation in which data-driven sustainability interventions can generate measurable emissions reductions per vehicle, per rental day, and per operator fleet. Drawing on the Natural Resource-Based View of the firm and Human Capital Theory, this paper conducts a systematic narrative literature review of peer-reviewed research on fleet sustainability analytics, electric vehicle adoption, telematics-based efficiency monitoring, and carbon footprint measurement. Five sustainability analytics tool categories are reviewed: telematics and driver behavior monitoring, carbon footprint calculation and reporting, predictive maintenance for efficiency preservation, fleet composition optimization for EV transition planning, and route and utilization optimization. The Technology-Organization-Environment framework is applied to map barriers to effective adoption. Five hypotheses are developed and an empirical validation design specifying variable measurement, data sources, and analytical approaches is proposed. The paper finds that sustainability analytics adoption in car rental operations is constrained primarily by the absence of regulatory mandates, data fragmentation across fleet management systems, and the absence of sustainability management capability in operations staff. The paper contributes the first integrated sustainability analytics framework specific to car rental fleet operations.

Decarbonization strategy; ESG reporting frameworks

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