Keeping a van fleet
off the ramp

Most fleet servicing is handled reactively: something goes wrong, somebody books the nearest slot, the van comes off the road for a day. Repeated across a fleet, that is an expensive habit nobody has ever costed.

Do the sum properly once

Take the vehicle’s day rate, add the driver on full pay, add the work that did not happen and the customer who was told next week. Compare that with the price of the service itself.

On most commercial fleets the downtime is several times the parts and labour. Once you see it that way, the cheapest quote that takes a van off the road stops being the cheapest option.

Batch it at the yard

Several vehicles in one visit is cheaper per vehicle and costs almost no downtime, because the work happens before the run rather than instead of it.

• No vehicle drives anywhere to be fixed.
• No driver sits in a waiting room on full pay.
• One visit, one invoice, one conversation.
• Small defects get caught on the same visit instead of becoming call-outs.

Use the walkaround you already do

Drivers do a daily check anyway. Adding thirty seconds — tyres, wipers, lights, any new noise — is the highest-return change a fleet can make to its maintenance bill.

Give them one simple rule: photograph it, send it, carry on. Somebody decides later whether it matters. A worn wiper reported in October is not a windscreen replacement in January.

Get the boring things in writing

Consolidated monthly invoicing, an agreed response window and a named contact rather than a call queue. None of it is exotic and all of it prevents arguments.

If you run vehicles across the patch, the fleet page sets out how depot visits work and what terms look like.