Tips For Extending The Life Of Business Fleet Vehicles

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Your company depends on your fleet vehicles and their longevity. The problem of making sure your vehicles last as long as possible can be a little hard to do. The following are a few tips meant to help extend the life of your fleet.

Dealing With Parts

You probably won’t wait too long to replace a gasket or a radiator. Both of these are major issues that can put one of your vehicles out of order, which may end up costing you even more money. The problem is things shouldn’t have gotten this bad.

Major issues like these, especially if they continue, is a sign that your vehicle is on it’s way out. What you want to do is practice maintenance, and to do that, you are going to fix smaller issues as soon as they appear. For example, replace the speedometer if the original stops working or any other small component. Most big issues stem from smaller issues that might have been overlooked.

Address Routine Maintenance

Sometimes, little problems don’t always show signs of trouble. There are times when little problems don’t really affect your driver’s ability to get the job done, which is why they are overlooked.

You don’t want little things to slip past you, so make sure you have all of your vehicles inspected with every scheduled maintenance. Those with a large fleet may want to consider hiring a fleet mechanic to work with you. If you have an in-house mechanic, maintenance and repairs should be much easier for you.

Promote Driving Education

The next thing you want to do is help your drivers become better and safer drivers. Good driving can extend the life of your vehicles in a number of ways. For example, the bad habit of riding the brakes could hurt your vehicle’s suspension system and prematurely degrade brakes.

Fixing your brakes or the suspension system constantly is going to cost you money and affect the longevity of your fleet. Have your drivers take defensive driving classes or regular driving classes from time to time to help them improve their craft. There are other habits you don’t want your drivers to continue, like accelerating too quickly.

Start to Monitor Drivers

It’ll be nice to say that you can trust your drivers, but sometimes, that isn’t the case. You may know these folks very well, but you aren’t always with them, so you do not know what they could be doing with your vehicle.

You are going to have to consider monitoring your drivers to make sure they are not abusing the company cars by doing something reckless or running errands that are not part of the job. Your vehicle’s longevity is sucked out with every extra mile. Thankfully, there are things you can do to monitor your drivers, like comparing the miles driven after each trip with the miles your company calculated before the job started.

Invest in Smart Driving Technology

Comparing predetermined miles to the miles actually driven does work, but you can also invest in smart driving technology. You can monitor each vehicle live using a GPS locator, which can also feed you with all sorts of additional data, such as instances of reckless driving, speeding, or unplanned detours.

Installing a GPS into every single vehicle in your fleet can also help you plan out routes better to speed up travel, reduce miles used, and reduce how much gas per trip is used. Be sure to do your research regarding which smart driving technology you install.

Hopefully, these tips help ensure that the life of your fleet is as long as it should be.