Penske Truck Leasing Brand Guidelines: Yellow Rental Trucks From a 1969 Pennsylvania Start

A rental and leasing business in eastern Pennsylvania.

Penske Truck Leasing dates its start to 1 December 1969, when Roger Penske, the owner of the Team Penske racing team, bought a car and light-truck rental and leasing business serving eastern Pennsylvania. The company’s own history page says that business had just three locations; English Wikipedia gives the same founding date and places the headquarters in Reading, Pennsylvania, where it remains.

Growth came through partnerships and purchases. By 1981, the company says, it had 33 facilities and 420 employees. In 1982 it joined the Hertz Truck Division to form Hertz-Penske Truck Leasing, then bought Goldston in 1983 and the truck renting and leasing business of Leaseway Transportation in 1986. When Hertz left in 1988, Penske Corporation formed a joint venture with GE Capital, which contributed its Gelco Truck Leasing business, and the two created Penske Truck Leasing Co., L.P., the name the company still uses.

The 1990s and 2000s added logistics and more fleets. The company bought the rest of Leaseway Transportation in 1995, set up Penske Logistics Europe in 1997 and bought the Dutch transport and warehousing firm Transportgroep van der Graaf in 1998. Canada’s Rentway followed in 2000, Rollins Truck Leasing of Wilmington, Delaware, in 2001, a South American logistics venture with Cotia Trading that became Penske Logistics Brazil in 2005, and the leasing, rental and logistics operations of AMI Leasing, bought from Ford Motor Credit, in 2004. Texas-based Bright Truck Leasing joined in 2010, Old Dominion Truck Leasing of Richmond, Virginia, in 2017, and Star Truck Rentals and Kris-Way Truck Leasing in 2023, according to the company.

Leasing, rental, maintenance and used trucks.

Penske describes four product lines: full-service truck leasing, contract maintenance, commercial and consumer truck rental, and used truck sales. Its rental arm, Penske Truck Rental, rents semi-trucks, straight trucks and trailers to businesses that haul freight and rents trucks to households for local and one-way moves, English Wikipedia says, with more than 85,000 rental trucks and more than 2,500 consumer rental locations in the United States, Canada and Australia. The company itself says Penske Truck Rental is “widely recognized for its iconic yellow trucks with blue stripes.”

Fleet counts vary by date and by what is counted. In July 2025 Business Insider put the leasing fleet at roughly 433,000 vehicles. In October 2026 Penske Automotive Group said Penske Transportation Solutions had more than 373,600 trucks, tractors and trailers under lease, rental or maintenance contracts, and the company’s history page, updated in June 2026, gives about 382,000 vehicles and about 950 maintenance facilities in North America.

Maintenance is the thread through the business. In October 2022 the Reading Eagle reported that Penske had taken over shop operations and maintenance for PGT Trucking of Aliquippa, covering more than 1,700 tractors and trailers at five sites, with access to more than 750 Penske maintenance locations and to its mobile apps and customer portal. The Business Insider report described Fleet Insight, the company’s maintenance system, and Catalyst AI, the in-house software Penske introduced in 2024 to look for patterns in vehicle data; one customer it named, the dairy cooperative Darigold, leased 111 tractors and 184 trailers. In 2024 Penske Used Trucks also launched Penske Auctions for off-lease vehicles, English Wikipedia says.

In 2019 the company marked its 50th year with a truck tour of 110 cities in the United States and Canada, it says, and introduced Penske Transportation Solutions as an umbrella name for Penske Truck Leasing, Penske Logistics and related units.

Livery, depots and portals.

Truck, trailer and refrigerated-vehicle leasing firms sell something customers mostly see on the road: the vehicle itself. Their fleets carry the company name and colours across highways, depots and delivery yards, so the livery does much of the work an advertising campaign would do elsewhere. Penske Truck Rental, for example, describes its rental fleet as yellow trucks with blue stripes, while English Wikipedia describes Ryder’s commercial rental vehicles as white trucks.

Colour also helps sort a fleet. Companies in this field often separate their brands by service, keeping a consumer rental name apart from a leasing or logistics name, and some publish photographs of tractors, box trucks, refrigerated bodies and trailers lined up at their own depots. Those depot images, along with maintenance bays and wash lanes, appear on company websites and in press releases.

Much of the customer relationship now runs through software. Leasing companies publish online booking for rental vehicles, mobile apps for drivers and fleet managers, and customer portals that show maintenance schedules, vehicle data and invoices. Penske names its system Fleet Insight, and Ryder has introduced apps and platforms under names such as RyderGyde and COOP, according to English Wikipedia.

Corporate pages tend to stress scale and ownership. These firms often list how many vehicles they manage and how many maintenance locations they run, and they set out who owns them, from family holdings to listed parents, joint ventures and investment funds. In this guide, fleet and location counts are given only as a dated source states them, and each brand’s owners are named as of the time of writing.

A partnership of three owners.

Ownership has shifted around a stable core. In 2015, the company says, Mitsui & Co. of Tokyo bought a 20 percent limited partnership interest from GE Capital, and in 2016 Penske Automotive Group bought a further 14.4 percent. In September 2017 General Electric sold the last of its stake, a 15.5 percent holding bought by Penske and a Mitsui subsidiary, English Wikipedia says. Today Penske Truck Leasing calls itself a partnership of Penske Corporation, Penske Automotive Group and Mitsui. Penske Automotive Group, a separately listed retailer of cars and commercial trucks, said in October 2026 that it owns 28.9 percent of Penske Transportation Solutions. In the same announcement it said it had agreed to be taken private by an entity owned by Penske Corporation and Mitsui: agreed in October 2026; not completed at the time of writing.

The two companies have also worked together abroad. In 2014 Penske Truck Leasing began truck rental in Australia with Brisbane-based Penske Commercial Vehicles, a Penske Automotive Group subsidiary, under the Penske Truck Rental name, and in 2022 it formed IndoPenske in Indonesia with Mitsui and IndoRent, according to the company. In 2024 it set up Penske Energy, a joint venture with ForeFront Power, to advise fleets on charging infrastructure.

The name also travels on race cars. English Wikipedia lists Penske Truck Leasing sponsorship on Team Penske IndyCar entries in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2015.

For a design guide, Penske Truck Leasing shows how one fleet colour scheme can carry a rental brand for households and a leasing brand for freight companies at the same time. Compare Penske Automotive Group, a part-owner, and Hertz, whose truck division was a partner from 1982 to 1988. For this guide we use a warm yellow and a deep blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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