As gas prices soar, one small car-rental company is profiting from its fleet of hybrids, fuel-saving cars propelled by both gas and batteries. But the big national rental firms have cut back on hybrids -- or never stocked them at all.

Hybrid specialist EV Rental Cars, based in Los Angeles, says it has doubled its fleet size in the last two years and now stocks the cars in eight Western cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Still, the company, which charges $35 to $50 a day, has a fleet of just 400.

Meanwhile, over the past few years Enterprise Rent-A-Car has shed about 2,700 hybrids because so many drivers want to buy the few that are made. Hertz, which has hybrids for rent mostly at a few West Coast locations, also has cut its fleet to just "a few hundred" hybrids for rent, spokesman Rich Broome says. Dollar, Avis and Alamo don't stock hybrid cars.

Hybrids also cost several thousand more dollars than regular cars of comparable size, an increase figured into the rental price. But Neil Abrams, of car-rental advisory firm Abrams Consulting Group in Purchase, N.Y., sees that changing: Car makers "have committed to building more of these things," and that could spur a price drop, he says.