“Cost per mile is flat. So why is the fleet costing more?”
Fleet cost is well understood in total and poorly understood per unit. The expensive vehicle is rarely the one with the highest maintenance bill; it is the one that is not moving.
cost per mile
utilization
empty running
VOR
planned vs reactive
telematics
residual value
Your words, not ours.
Where it concentrates here
Five places the money tends to
go in transport and fleet. Each one is concentrated — a single agreement, a single queue,
a single account nobody reviews — which is why sampling walks straight past them.
Utilization measured on vehicles available rather than vehicles earning, so idle assets look like capacity.
Reactive maintenance displacing planned maintenance, raising both cost and downtime, reported as a maintenance budget overrun rather than a scheduling failure.
Lease renewals rolling automatically on terms set when the fleet profile was different.
Fuel and energy procurement on a card scheme with rebates nobody reconciles.
Incident and damage cost visible in insurance premium long after the behavior that caused it could have been addressed.
Not every transport and fleet is the same business
For-hire truckingRevenue per mile against a cost per mile that was calculated before the last insurance renewal and the last driver pay increase.
Private and dedicated fleetsA cost center inside another business, where nobody has priced what outsourcing would actually cost by comparison.
Last mile and courierContractor classification, per-stop economics and route density that determine whether a contract earns anything.
Specialized and heavy haulPermits, escorts and deadhead that are quoted from memory and vary enormously.
Passenger and shuttleUtilization against fixed schedules, where an underused run is invisible inside a contract price.
Where this data actually lives
Samsara, Motive or Geotab for telematics; McLeod or TMW where dispatch is the core
A fuel card program whose exception reports nobody reviews
Maintenance in a separate shop system that does not share cost per unit with finance
ELD data that answers compliance questions and is never used for costing
Named because it changes what the intake asks for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them rather than surprised by them.
Reported in your numbers, not ours
cost per mile
revenue per mile
empty or deadhead ratio
fuel economy by unit
maintenance cost per unit
CSA score
driver turnover
on-time delivery
The obligations that set the deadlines
DOT and FMCSA compliance, hours of service, and the CSA score that prices insurance
IFTA fuel tax reporting and mileage substantiation
Driver qualification files, drug and alcohol program records
Worker classification for owner-operators and contract drivers
DVIR and maintenance records, which become evidence after any incident
What the review would ask you for
7 requests written for transport and fleet
and asked of nobody else — 3 of them core. They sit alongside
the operating spine every business has — finance, revenue, receivables,
payables, contracts, people, IT, operations, risk, commercial and governance
— which is 107 further requests.
Cost per mile or per journey CoreFuel, maintenance, driver, overhead.
Vehicle and driver utilization CoreIncluding empty running and idle time.
MaintenancePlanned versus breakdown, in-house versus outsourced.
Fuel and energyConsumption, procurement and any card scheme.
Driver hours, licensing and vehicle compliance
Incidents, damage and insurance claims
Anything you do not have can be skipped in one
click, with a reason. The intake is completed in the
client portal, which saves each answer as it is given and can be
returned to as often as you like.
When this stops being interesting and becomes urgent
An insurance renewal after a claim or a CSA score change
A customer contract renewal without a defensible cost per mile
A DOT audit or a compliance review
Fuel or driver pay moving faster than contracted rate escalators
A misclassification claim from a contractor driver
Who this involves
Signs it: Owner, president or CFO
Resists it: Dispatch and operations, whose lane and route economics become visible
Has been asking for it: Safety and compliance, who have been asking for the maintenance data
Who commissions it
Fleet directors, operations managers and CFOs. Phase one is priced before phase two is
discussed, the report is yours either way, and we take no vendor commissions or referral
fees on anything we recommend.
The proposal sets out the sequence week by
week, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your number of operating
units. No call required to see the number.
Closest to this
Operations that share more with transport and fleet than the sector label
suggests.