The maintenance blind spots costing fleets more than they realize

Maintenance has become one of the most volatile line items in the fleet budget. According to a recent trends report, the average vehicle on U.S. roads is now 13 years old, a record high that's driving more frequent repairs and longer service intervals. Layer on a technician shortage, with roughly 70,000 annual openings for automotive technicians over the next decade, and it's easy to see why labor rates, parts costs, and repair cycle times are all climbing at once.

The good news is that fleets can directly influence the cost of maintenance. But managing it effectively requires visibility into key factors, such as knowing exactly where money is going, why certain assets cost more than others, and where spend is leaking out of the system unnoticed. Below is a checklist of the metrics every fleet should track to understand their maintenance ROI and find room to optimize.

Key maintenance metrics that matter 

Taking control of your maintenance ROI starts with knowing which numbers actually matter. These key metrics that will give you real numbers to see where money is going, where it's leaking out, and where a process change could unlock meaningful savings. Track these consistently, and you'll spend less time reacting to cost overruns and more time preventing them.

→ Spend by asset, make, and model

Not all vehicles cost the same to maintain, even within the same fleet. Tracking cost per asset, and rolling that up by make and model, reveals which vehicles are consistently more expensive to keep on the road. Without this view, a chronically underperforming model can quietly drain the budget for years before anyone notices. Fleets should review this data regularly and feed it into replacement planning, flagging assets whose maintenance costs are starting to outweigh their remaining useful life.

→ Preventative vs. reactive maintenance ratio

A healthy maintenance program depends on scheduled, preventative work rather than emergency fixes. When reactive repairs make up a growing share of total spend, it usually signals missed services or ignored warning signs. Tracking this ratio over time helps fleets catch the shift early and reinforce maintenance compliance before small issues become expensive breakdowns. For example, Michigan State University saw a 30% increase in hours between PM cycles after digitizing their maintenance. 

→ Roadside vs. planned repair costs

Roadside repairs can cost several times more than the same job handled in a planned shop visit, and they almost always come with added downtime. When roadside incidents are treated as one-off emergencies rather than tracked as a category, fleets can miss important patterns. Repeated roadside calls on the same asset or component usually point to a preventative maintenance gap. Track roadside spend separately and use it to tighten maintenance schedules for the assets and parts that keep failing on the road. For example, The City of Poughkeepsie has been able to significantly reduce the cost of repairs by doing more in house. The City’s Director of Public Works, Christopher Gent, said, “a repair that would cost $2,000 in house could easily be $10,000 if we used a vendor.” Now, the City can redirect those funds to other uses.

→ Repeat shop visits

A vehicle that returns to the shop days after a repair is a red flag for inefficiency. These boomerang visits pile on downtime, administrative work, and technician hours that could have been avoided if all open issues—the original repair, active fault codes, driver-reported defects, and upcoming maintenance—had been addressed in a single visit. Tracking repeat-visit rate by asset and by shop helps identify where technicians need better visibility into everything tied to a vehicle before it leaves the bay.

→ Warranty leakage

Warranty leakage happens when a fleet pays out of pocket for a repair that should have been covered under a manufacturer or parts warranty, usually because no one had visibility into what was still under coverage. This is especially common with disconnected, paper-based tracking, where warranty terms live in filing cabinets or a mechanic's memory. Fleets need a system that flags warrantable repairs automatically before work begins, not after the invoice is paid. Bramco, the financial holding company for Brandeis Machinery and Power Equipment, expects to see a 7x return on their investment in connected maintenance by stopping warranty leakage.

→ Technician wrench time

Skilled technicians are scarce, so every hour matters. Yet, according to a study by DuPont, many spend as much as 65% of a shift on non-wrench activities like hunting for paperwork, deciphering handwritten notes, or waiting on updates. Tracking wrench time versus administrative time shows how much shop capacity is being lost to friction rather than actual repairs, as well as where digital work orders could free up hours without adding headcount. RelaDyne, the largest lubricant sales, distribution, and equipment reliability service provider in North America, used Connected Maintenance to lower work order processing time by 66% and significantly reduce non-wrench time. 

→ Asset downtime and utilization

The time that a vehicle spends off the road can also push costs higher. A vehicle that sits waiting on parts, a technician, or an open work order loses value every day it's out of service, regardless of what the eventual repair bill looks like. Tracking downtime by asset, and measuring it against your uptime targets, shows which vehicles or shops are creating the biggest operational drag and how that drag is affecting dispatch, delivery, and revenue. After digitizing their maintenance workflows, Garden City Public Schools, for example, was able to reduce repair costs by 66%, improve vehicle uptime by 20%, and achieved more than $150K in annual savings across maintenance and operations.

→ Administrative time and invoice processing

Manually entering maintenance invoices can take 20–40 minutes each, and with dozens or hundreds processed monthly, that adds up to real costs and delays. The longer it takes to get accurate cost data into the system, the harder it is to catch overspending in time to act on it. For example, Bonnie Plants, the nation's largest herb and vegetable plant producer, uses modern AI solutions to process stacks of invoices in mere minutes.

How Samsara makes it easy to manage maintenance—and realize ROI

Tracking all of these metrics manually—across spreadsheets, shop software, and paper files—is exactly the kind of fragmented process that hides the very costs fleets are trying to control. Samsara's Connected Maintenance solution solves this by unifying telematics, inspections, work orders, and cost tracking in a single platform, so every metric above lives in one place instead of scattered across systems that don't talk to each other.

With a connected view, maintenance teams can:

• View everything tied to an asset, fault codes, open defects, and upcoming PM, in one work order, cutting down on boomerang visits. 

• Link inspections (DVIRs or any asset inspections) directly to repairs within the Connected Maintenance platform, closing compliance gaps and creating a clear audit trail.

• Use AI to process invoices and extract costs automatically, turning a 20-40-minute task into seconds

• Use centralized warranty tracking to flag eligible repairs before they're paid out of pocket 

The result is a maintenance program where leaders manage performance instead of paperwork, with fewer repeat repairs, less administrative time, stronger compliance, and a lower total cost of ownership.

Ready to get more visibility into your maintenance spend? Click to learn more about Samsara Connected Maintenance.