There are two information each fleet that runs its personal store has: what was reported by the truck on the street, and what will get written up by the technician within the bay. An evergreen problem is that these information don’t all the time match. Motive constructed its latest product on the premise that closing that hole is the most affordable manner left to carry down fleet restore prices.
The corporate just lately introduced Motive Upkeep to sort out this. It’s an AI-powered system that pulls fault codes, inspection defects, work orders and restore spend into the identical platform that already holds its prospects’ telematics and gas card information.
Rising service prices are behind the timing. Carriers’ common marginal price reached $2.336 per mile in 2025, the best within the historical past of the report, based on the American Transportation Analysis Institute’s 2026 Evaluation of the Operational Prices of Trucking. Upkeep and restore climbed 8.6% yr over yr in that dataset, a further 2 cents per mile, and the class is up 45% since 2019, in accordance to Fleet Upkeep. Solely tolls, up 13.2%, rose quicker final yr. Non-fuel prices hit $1.854 per mile, breaking the $1.78 file the Motive report cites from 2024. Gasoline is the quantity carriers argue about, and upkeep is the one compounding beneath it.
That stress originates within the components market. Elements prices rose 3.7% yr over yr within the fourth quarter of 2025 whereas labor slipped 0.4%, based on the latest Decisiv/TMC Elements & Labor Service Benchmark Report. Elements are up 23.8% since early 2020 in the identical dataset.
The Motive report places the typical annual restore and upkeep invoice for a heavy-duty truck in the US at $16,192, a quantity constructed on ATRI’s 2024 figures. That baseline is already stale by a yr of 8.6% development.
Motive’s personal analysis, carried out with BigRig Analysis within the second quarter of 2026, drilled down on the place fleets are feeling the squeeze. Rising upkeep and restore prices ranked because the main operational problem for 80% of respondents, with driver recruitment and retention at 60% and gas price administration and fraud prevention at 50% among the many different main considerations. Solely 13% described their fleet know-how techniques as well-integrated and sharing information routinely throughout platforms.
“Typically whenever you take a look at what’s high of thoughts for fleets, it’s very clear that upkeep is popping out as the highest subject primarily due to rising restore prices,” stated Sriteja Kolluri, who leads the upkeep product at Motive, in an interview with BigRig. “One of many necessary information factors there may be what number of of them have well-integrated techniques that truly talk information routinely. That reply is barely 13%, which implies an enormous variety of fleets have disconnected techniques or spreadsheets that they use and so they don’t speak to one another.”
The place Fleet Restore Prices Really Cover
The cash disappears within the hole between deliberate work and emergency work. Reactive repairs run three to 9 instances the price of deliberate preventive upkeep, based on the Decisiv/TMC service benchmark information. FleetNet America breakdown information was additionally cited within the report.
Kolluri gave an instance of the highest finish of that vary utilizing a 1,000-truck fleet.
“When you truly calculate that for a fleet with a thousand automobiles, with virtually $760 a day and virtually 8 to 9 days of breakdown per car, that’s virtually $4 million that they spend in downtime,” he stated.
These inputs come from that FleetNet America and TMC roadside upkeep information: 8.7 days of unplanned downtime per car per yr, at $448 to $760 per day in misplaced productiveness.
From Cryptic Fault Code to Work Order
Earlier than this launch, a vital fault code produced an alert in a single system, and the store work acquired scheduled in one other.
“You’ve gotten a car that’s on the street which has damaged down, or there’s a vital fault code that has simply occurred. Immediately, earlier than this launch, that information is simply an alert that goes to the fleet supervisor,” Kolluri stated. “With this, what occurs is that alert principally interprets into a piece order that the upkeep store can truly prioritize. In order that’s principally the bridge that we’re constructing right here.”
The interpretation of fault codes issues simply as a lot because the routing. A fault code arrives as a string solely a technician can learn, and Motive’s diagnostics convert it into plain language with a severity rating hooked up. Now an outline, as an alternative of a code, determines whether or not a truck is available in in the present day or later.
Kolluri drew a distinction on the Motive Card, the corporate’s fleet gas card. It doesn’t pay the restore invoice.
“The Motive Card principally provides you the gas spend information. Then with work orders you’re truly capturing the upkeep information as effectively. So each put collectively principally provides you your correct price per mile per asset,” he stated.
The Prediction Downside Is an Integration Downside
Two-thirds of respondents, 67%, stated they battle to foretell which automobiles are susceptible to failure or unplanned downtime. That’s the only most-cited ache level within the research. The adoption information reveals how far the upkeep tooling lags the issue. AI-driven driver security monitoring is in manufacturing at 88% of the fleets that answered the query, whereas predictive or condition-based upkeep sits at 20% adoption, with 60% not utilizing it in any respect. Lack of inside experience or IT assets was the most-cited barrier to getting extra worth out of AI, at 33%.
Guide work fills the area the integrations depart open. Roughly 29% of respondents estimated their groups spend 11 to twenty hours every week re-keying telematics information into upkeep software program, reconciling gas transactions and updating inspection information, and one other 29% stated they’ve by no means tracked the quantity in any respect.
“The information already exists on the market. [DVIR] inspections exist, fault codes exist, your schedules exist, however no one’s truly bringing all that info collectively and supplying you with a whole image of your fleet well being,” Kolluri stated. “It’s troublesome for fleets to do well being monitoring when it’s important to obtain all this information from completely different techniques and do VLOOKUPs and whatnot.”
TCO Was At all times Tribal Information
The visibility drawback hits hardest when figuring out the entire price of possession. Problem monitoring true per-vehicle price of possession affected 67% of respondents, and a single dashboard displaying per-vehicle TCO throughout each spend class was the highest requested repair at 40%. Greater than half, 53%, stated reducing whole upkeep and restore prices per car would do extra for profitability over the subsequent 12 to 24 months than some other change.
With out that quantity, the repair-or-replace determination runs on tribal information and a service supervisor’s reminiscence.
“When a car breaks down, do I would like to interchange it or do I must restore it. That is once more one other necessary piece that is available in with the TCO visibility coming in. 67% of the fleets truly usually are not capable of convey this information collectively in time,” Kolluri stated.
Upkeep is Motive’s seventh product on the platform, and it’s out there now in the US and Canada. Motive’s 2026 ROI report put the typical car uptime achieve throughout respondents at 18%.
For the fleets shopping for it, the take a look at is whether or not the paper path modifications the bill.
“Earlier than Motive Upkeep, what occurred on the street and what occurred within the store have been two separate information,” stated Luke Crawley, fleet supervisor at H&R Agri-Energy. “Reasonably than paying emergency charges when one thing fails, we’ll be capable of repair points early, run greater uptime, save a whole lot of hours every week, and spend far much less to maintain our fleet shifting.”
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