Mixed Mileage Fleet Strategies
No matter your territory type, it’s a challenge to optimize your fleet strategy - especially if you run multiple CSAs, or have mixed mileage territories.
Buying trucks, leasing trucks, running trucks on the “right” routes, maximizing truck utilization without entirely depreciating your fleet’s value…it’s a lot to keep track of, and every contractor’s situation is unique. How do you determine the best way to optimize your unique operations? In this blog post, the Hello Truck Lease team shares some best practices for successfully optimizing a mixed mileage fleet strategy.
Refresh 10%-20% of your fleet annually.
It’s an industry best practice to refresh 10%-20% of your fleet annually. This strategy prevents catastrophically expensive maintenance issues like an engine failure, and also helps contractors stay current with safety technology.
Retire trucks before they lose their value.
If you’re refreshing your fleet regularly, this approach will align with your annual fleet maintenance patterns. What you don’t want to happen is for one of the previously mentioned catastrophic maintenance issues to occur, which takes a truck out of your fleet, creates a very expensive maintenance issue, and drives the value of the truck down to nearly zero. That’s why we recommend selling your oldest trucks before the end of their utilization lifespan.
For a P1000, the average lifespan is about 250k miles. But the closer you get to that threshold, the more likely you are to experience expensive maintenance incidents. We recommend selling or retiring older trucks around 200k miles so they still retain some residual value.
Rotate your fleet throughout your entire operation.
If you have a mixed mileage territory or multiple CSAs, chances are you’ve got a range of route types for your trucks to take on. We recommend looking at your entire operation to optimize your fleet strategy.
The farther out you go from your terminal, the farther you are from help - breakdowns are, operationally speaking, the most problematic on high mileage, rural routes, where it could take hours to get a repair done or to put a replacement truck on the route. You don’t want your oldest, most unreliable vehicles out on these runs. However, because of the mileage, it doesn’t make sense to run leased trucks on these routes either. The optimal truck for these routes is a well-maintained, slightly used unit.
How do you know a used vehicle’s maintenance history? Is it possible to feel comfortable running a used vehicle on a high-mileage route? That’s where a mixed fleet solution comes into play.
Use a combination of leased and purchased vehicles.
Run new, leased trucks with all maintenance and repair covered* through the lease on your lower mileage routes. When those trucks hit the end of their lease term, you’ll have the full picture of their wear and tear, miles run, and maintenance history, plus an opportunity to purchase them for an attractive residual - because they’ll have been part of your business from the day they first hit the road.
At the end of the lease term, rotate those trucks over to your high-mileage routes. They’ll have plenty of miles left in their lifespan, and you won’t have to worry about a catastrophic maintenance event happening in a remote area. This approach prevents operational hassles and lets you focus on running a successful, profitable business.
Then, rotate your older trucks from the high-mileage routes into your middle-mileage territories, and retire your oldest vehicles.
Refresh and rotate your fleet every year to optimize your mixed mileage fleet strategy and minimize the risk of catastrophic maintenance events.
*except tires, glass, and physical damage
Get a free fleet analysis from the experts at Hello Truck Lease.
Still unsure of the most effective way to structure and refresh your fleet to cover mixed mileage territories? We’re now offering free fleet analyses to contractors to help solve this pain point - as former contractors ourselves, we understand the complexities of maintaining an optimal fleet management strategy.
At Hello Truck Lease, we’re dedicated to helping contractors run successful, profitable businesses. We’re committed to sharing our knowledge and expertise with others in the industry - we believe that shared knowledge and collective, collaborative success result in great things.
Email us today to start a conversation about your fleet strategy objectives. We’ll run a complimentary analysis on your fleet, and provide recommendations for how you can most effectively and efficiently achieve your goals.
