Trucking fleet maintenance is one of those things that feels “fine” right up until it isn’t.
A truck misses a load because it’s down for a repair that could’ve been caught a week earlier. A driver gets pulled into a roadside inspection with a small issue that turns into a bigger delay. A trailer light problem becomes a night of phone calls.
Then the costs stack up. Lost revenue, late deliveries, higher cost per mile, and drivers frustrated that they’re running equipment that doesn’t feel dependable.
The goal of fleet maintenance isn’t perfection. It’s predictability.
A solid preventative maintenance program helps you keep trucks working, reduce surprises, and stay inspection-ready without turning your operation into paperwork.
This guide breaks down a simple, repeatable trucking fleet maintenance program, a practical checklist, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that tell you if your plan is actually working.
Trucking fleet maintenance is the process of keeping your trucks, trailers, and fleet equipment safe, reliable, and ready to work.
It includes preventive maintenance (planned service), corrective repairs (fixing issues as they happen), inspections, documentation, and the daily habits that keep small problems from becoming expensive downtime.
A lot of fleets confuse “fleet management” and “fleet maintenance.”
Fleet management is the bigger umbrella. It includes dispatch, safety, fuel, drivers, compliance, utilization, and operations. Fleet maintenance is the part that ensures the equipment is mechanically ready to run, and that issues are caught and documented before they cost you money on the road.
Maintenance matters because downtime isn’t just a shop bill. It’s an operational hit to revenue.
When a truck is down, you’re not only paying to fix it, you’re losing work time, pushing schedules, creating dispatch gaps, and often burning hours trying to recover the day.
A breakdown rarely costs only the repair amount.
It costs a missed appointment, a late delivery, detention, rescheduling, and sometimes a load you don’t get back. Even small issues like tires, lights, air leaks can become expensive when they turn into delays.
A preventive plan keeps you from paying “emergency pricing” over and over again.
Roadside inspections don’t care how busy your week is.
When your fleet has consistent inspection habits and a clean maintenance record trail, you reduce the chance of getting slowed down for something that should’ve been handled at the yard.
The fleets that do best here aren’t doing “extra.” They’re doing the basics every day, and they’re capturing it in a system that’s easy to manage. If you want to set your fleet apart from the rest then managing the basics of fleet maintenance is critical.
Every fleet has both. The question is which one runs your business.
Reactive maintenance is what happens when you’re always putting out fires. Preventive maintenance is what keeps the fires smaller and less frequent.
Preventive maintenance is planned service based on miles, time, or engine hours.
The win is simple: when you service components before they fail, you control the timing. You pick the shop day. You reduce the chance of a breakdown at the worst moment.
Preventive maintenance also makes costs more predictable. Even if you spend consistently, you avoid the big spikes that come from unplanned failures. Being able to schedule preventative maintenance in trucking is basically a super power.
Reactive maintenance will always exist. Things break. Drivers hit road debris. Parts wear out faster than expected.
But reactive maintenance should be the exception, not the norm.
When a fleet is mostly reactive, the problem usually isn’t “bad luck.” It’s that issues aren’t being captured early, the service schedule isn’t matched to real usage, or the shop process isn’t closing the loop.
This is a basic program most small-to-mid fleets can follow. Not complicated. Just consistent.
If your maintenance program lives in someone’s head, it doesn’t scale.
Write a simple policy that defines:
Who reports issues, who approves repairs, where the truck goes, how quickly decisions get made, and what gets documented.
This doesn’t need to be fancy. A one-page policy is enough. The point is consistency so drivers and office staff aren’t guessing. Leveraging DVIR tools will really help with bringing truck issues to the forefront.
A common mistake is using one interval for everything.
Some trucks run hard in stop-and-go work. Others run long highway miles. Some trailers see constant loading cycles and others sit.
Build service intervals that reflect how equipment is actually used.
Miles-based intervals work well for long-haul. Engine hours can matter more for local work or high idle time. Time-based intervals help when equipment isn’t moving consistently but still needs attention.
Many truck and trailer manufactures have recommended maintenance routine scheduels with their packets when you purchase new equipment. Use these to help prevent "reinventing the wheel" when it comes to a maintenance program.
Drivers are your first line of maintenance. They see the equipment every day.
But inspections only help if they’re realistic.
A maintenance program fails when inspections feel like a long form nobody wants to fill out. Keep daily routines short and focused on safety and common failure points.
The goal is to catch issues early and report them in a way that actually makes it to the shop.
Using electronic DVIR tools or enforcing pre-trip and post-trip inspections will help bring attention to maintenance related issues.
A lot of fleets “fix trucks,” but they don’t close the loop.
A driver reports an issue. Someone makes a call. A repair gets done. Then nobody records what happened, what part failed, or whether the issue came back.
Your process should be simple:
Report → Assign → Repair → Verify → Record.
That last part is what prevents repeat problems and gives you a clean history when you need it.
Waiting for a breakdown is expensive.
Most fleets can catch common issues earlier by paying attention to trends:
Recurring DVIR notes, fault codes, repeated tire replacements, brake wear patterns, or equipment that keeps going out for the same thing.
You don’t need a “data science team” to do this. You just need a system that makes it easy to see what’s happening and doesn’t bury you in noise.
Trucks don’t only go down because something broke. They stay down because something is slow.
Parts delays, vendor backlogs, unclear approval steps, and no visibility into status can turn a one-day repair into a week of downtime.
Track where you send equipment, how long repairs take, and which vendors are reliable. If a shop keeps turning simple work into long delays, that’s not “normal.” It’s a cost center.
If you never review your maintenance data, you’re just collecting it.
Set a monthly review and keep it short.
Look at what broke, what repeated, which trucks are costing more, where downtime is coming from, and whether PM is being completed on time.
You’ll catch patterns fast, especially repeat repairs and equipment that’s trending toward being unreliable. Spend a few hours every month reviewing the data you collected and see if you notice any patterns and areas for improvement.
Key Performance Indicators KPIs only matter if they change decisions.
Pick a small set you can track consistently. Start with 1 or 2 items and monitor those for a month or quarter. Use them to answer:
Are we doing PM on time?
Are breakdowns decreasing?
Are trucks staying down too long?
Are costs under control?
Once those KPIs are under control pick 1 or 2 more to track for the next time frame. Doing this routinely will have a compounding effect and will help making your maintenance much more predictive and streamlined.
Checklists help if they’re practical.
Don’t aim for a 50-point list that nobody uses. Build routines that match how your fleet actually operates.
Focus on safety and the issues that commonly put trucks out of service.
Lights, tires, obvious air leaks, brakes, coupling, load securement, and anything that would trigger a roadside inspection.
If a driver sees something, they need a quick way to report it and document it without waiting until the end of the week.
Weekly checks help catch issues that don’t always show up in a quick walk around.
Tire wear trends, trailer lights that “work sometimes,” slow air leaks, strap and tarp condition, and small problems that become big if they get ignored.
This can be handled by a lead driver, shop staff, or whoever owns equipment readiness in your operation.
This is where preventive maintenance earns its keep.
Oil and fluids, filters, brakes, tires, suspension checks, air system checks, and the deeper inspection items that keep you from living in reactive mode.
It’s also the best time to address “minor but annoying” issues that drivers stop reporting because they think nobody will fix them.
Those small issues are usually early warning signs.
You don’t want inspection prep to become a scramble.
When your PM is consistent and your documentation is organized, inspections become routine instead of stressful.
The best fleets treat inspection readiness like a steady habit, not a once-a-year panic.
Here are the KPIs that actually help fleets make decisions.
This tells you if you’re doing preventive maintenance on time.
If your PM compliance is low, you’ll feel it later in breakdowns, higher costs, and more downtime.
making sure DVIRs are always preformed by drivers daily will help with calculating your compliance rate. An easy way to calculate this is by dividing the number of DVIRs performed on an asset (truck/trailer) by the number of days the assets were used.
You can measure this as breakdowns per truck per month, or any way that fits your operation.
If breakdowns are trending up, it’s usually a schedule problem, an inspection problem, or a repeat repair problem.
Backlog is the work that’s known but not completed.
A growing backlog is a warning sign that your shop capacity, vendor flow, or decision process is too slow.
How long is equipment down from report to return-to-service?
This is one of the most important KPIs because it directly impacts revenue and dispatch reliability.
Total maintenance cost per mile helps you understand the real cost of keeping equipment running.
The goal isn’t always to drive this number down at all costs. Sometimes spending more on preventive maintenance reduces the expensive spikes and lowers the total over time.
Maintenance record keeping doesn’t need to be complicated, but it needs to be consistent.
At minimum, you want a clean history of:
What was reported, what was repaired, when it was repaired, and what parts or work were performed.
When your records are scattered across texts, paper forms, and invoices, you lose time every time you need to answer a simple question like:
“When was this last serviced?”
“Has this issue happened before?”
“Did we actually fix it or just patch it?”
Centralizing records is one of the fastest ways to reduce wasted admin time in fleet maintenance.
Fleet maintenance is a daily workflow, not a once-a-month meeting.
BIT is built for fleets that want compliance and visibility without running five disconnected systems.
When drivers have simple workflows for inspections and reporting, you catch issues earlier and reduce the “surprise breakdown” problem.
Paperless DVIR-style workflows and document capture reduce the chances of missing reports or losing paperwork when you need it.
Maintenance improves when operations can see what’s happening across trucks and routes.
When you can spot patterns, repeat issues, recurring alerts, equipment that’s always getting held up then you can make decisions based on real data instead of assumptions.
Most fleets don’t need an enterprise maintenance overhaul.
They need a system that drivers can use, the office can manage, and the business can rely on.
That’s the lane BIT lives in: practical tools, plug-and-play hardware, and a connected platform that reduces manual admin work.
If you want to build a maintenance program that’s easier to run week after week, the best next step is to simplify how you collect inspections, track issues, and keep records in one place.
Truck maintenance includes preventive service, corrective repairs, inspections, documentation, and the daily processes that keep trucks and trailers safe and reliable. It’s the system that supports uptime.
Fleet management is the full operation of drivers, dispatch, safety, compliance, fuel, and utilization. Fleet maintenance is the part focused on keeping equipment mechanically ready to run and documenting repairs and inspections.
Service frequency depends on miles, engine hours, duty cycle, and operating conditions. Long-haul fleets often use miles-based intervals, while local or high-idle operations may rely more on engine hours or time-based intervals.
A working checklist includes daily driver safety checks, weekly yard checks, scheduled preventive maintenance items, and a process for reporting and documenting issues. The best checklists are short enough to be used consistently.
The most useful KPIs are PM compliance rate, breakdown frequency, maintenance backlog, downtime days, repair cycle time, and maintenance cost per mile. These tell you whether your program is preventing downtime or reacting to it.
Drivers are the first line of defense. They notice small issues early from air leaks, tire wear, lighting problems, brake feel changes and their inspection and reporting habits can prevent bigger repairs later.
Reduce downtime by improving preventive maintenance compliance, catching issues early through inspections and diagnostics, tracking vendor turnaround time, and tightening your approval process so repairs don’t stall.
Technology helps by making inspections easier, centralizing documentation, providing visibility into fleet activity, and supporting early detection of issues. The simpler the workflow, the more consistently it gets used.