Jordan Blake ยท
Unplanned downtime is the single most expensive line in a fleet budget, and it almost never shows up as a line at all. It hides inside missed deliveries, overtime, rental replacements and the slow erosion of customer trust.
Over the last twelve months we tracked 611 vehicles across eleven customers, comparing units on a strict PM interval against units serviced reactively. The reactive group averaged 2.8 unplanned events per unit per year. The PM group averaged 0.6.
The cost gap is wider than the event gap, because unplanned repairs happen at the worst possible time and place. A brake job scheduled in your own yard is a fraction of the same job on a shoulder at 2am.
The practical takeaway is not "do more maintenance". It is "move maintenance from reactive to scheduled, and move it to where the vehicle already sits". That second half is where mobile service changes the arithmetic.