Better Fleet: Why fleet maintenance costs keep rising without a clear explanation

Fleet maintenance budgets are becoming harder to predict.

Parts, labour and increasingly complex vehicle technology are all adding cost. But the headline increase rarely tells a fleet manager what is actually going wrong.

Is the fleet simply paying more for necessary servicing? Are particular vehicles developing repeated faults? Is one depot damaging tyres and suspension components faster than another? Or are vehicles being kept in service beyond the point at which continued repair makes commercial sense?

Until those questions can be answered, rising service, maintenance and repair spend remains a budget problem rather than a manageable operational issue.

External costs are rising

Some of the pressure is outside the fleet manager’s control.

Webfleet reports that UK vehicle-parts prices increased by 35% between 2020 and 2024, with clutch prices rising by 40% and some other components by more than a third. Newer vehicles can also require more specialist equipment and expertise when sensors, cameras and advanced safety systems are involved.

That means a stable maintenance programme can still cost more than it did several years ago.

However, inflation alone does not explain why two similar vehicles, suppliers or depots can produce very different results.

That difference is where fleets need to look.

Necessary and avoidable costs are being mixed together

Not every maintenance cost is evidence of poor control.

Scheduled servicing, safety inspections, tyres and worn components are necessary costs of operating safe vehicles.

The difficulty begins when these are reported alongside:

  • Accidental damage
  • Repeated repairs
  • Premature component replacement
  • Missed warranty claims
  • Roadside work
  • Faults caused by unsuitable vehicle use

A single annual SMR total cannot always show the difference.

It tells the fleet manager what has been spent, but not how much of that expenditure was planned, reactive or potentially avoidable.

That makes it difficult to challenge invoices, change driver behaviour or demonstrate why a vehicle needs replacing.

Fleet averages hide expensive exceptions

Average maintenance cost per vehicle is useful for budgeting, but it can create false reassurance.

  • A reasonable fleet-wide average may conceal:
  • One model with repeated electrical faults
  • An ageing group of high-cost vehicles
  • A depot experiencing excessive tyre damage
  • A supplier completing the same repair more than once
  • Vehicles being used beyond their intended payload or operating conditions

The average does not identify the cause, so fleet managers need to compare vehicles by type, age, mileage, location and operational role. A van completing urban multi-drop work should not be assessed in exactly the same way as one travelling mainly on motorways.

Higher cost does not automatically mean worse performance, but unexplained differences always deserve investigation.

Maintenance records are not the same as maintenance insight

Many fleets already hold substantial amounts of maintenance information.

The problem is often that it sits across workshop invoices, leasing-company reports, spreadsheets, driver-defect systems and telematics platforms.

FleetCheck describes how M&Y Maintenance and Construction moved away from manual spreadsheets after finding it increasingly difficult to track maintenance schedules and access essential information across its 228 cars and vans. The company subsequently used a central fleet system to automate processes and improve visibility of vehicle-off-road rectification and maintenance requirements.

Fleet manager Justin Toole described the system as his day-to-day “go to”, illustrating the difference between storing fleet information and having it readily available when decisions need to be made.

The commercial value comes from connecting the information.

A repair request means more when the authoriser can immediately see that the same component was replaced four months earlier.

Repair can become false economy

Keeping a vehicle for longer may delay capital expenditure or avoid an inconvenient replacement.

It may also expose the fleet to increasing repair costs.

The correct question is not simply:

Can this vehicle be repaired?

But, instead…

Is this repair likely to give us reliable, cost-effective service from this point onwards?

A £1500 repair viewed in isolation may appear reasonable.

The same repair looks different when the vehicle has already required several unscheduled interventions, has a rising cost per mile and is approaching replacement.

Historic expenditure should not justify further expenditure automatically.

Fleets need an explanation rather than another total

Rising prices mean maintenance budgets will remain under pressure.

The fleet manager’s opportunity is to identify which costs are necessary and which are being generated by preventable failures, poor visibility or delayed decisions.

That starts by separating spend into meaningful categories and identifying the vehicles, depots, suppliers and defects creating the greatest exceptions.

Article Two in this series examines what leading fleets do differently, from measuring the right costs to strengthening repair authorisation and supplier control.

Read What effective fleet maintenance-cost control actually looks like: Better Fleet: What effective fleet maintenance-cost control actually l – FleetWise

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