Fleet Servicing

What does fleet servicing cost for a Surrey business?

Fleet rates start at £135 for a van interim service and £219 for a full service, with Class 7 MOTs at the £58.60 DVSA maximum and Class 4 at £54.85. There's no joining fee, no retainer and no minimum contract — account customers pay for work done, consolidated into one monthly invoice on agreed credit terms.

The real cost lever isn't the rate card, though — it's downtime. A working trade van around Esher, Cobham or Walton bills its owner several hundred pounds a day; a maintenance model that loses two van-days per service quietly costs more than every line on our invoice combined. That's why fleet pricing here is built around same-day turnaround, parts pre-ordered against the booking and collection from your yard: the labour rate matters less than the van being back on the road by 4pm.

After the initial fleet review we'll put a realistic annual maintenance figure against your actual vehicles — mileage bands, what's due when, the big-ticket items coming — the kind of forecast lease companies charge a management fee to produce.

What is VOR — and why should it choose your garage?

VOR — vehicle off road — is the time a vehicle is unavailable to earn. For a small fleet it's the dominant maintenance cost: a van in a garage queue still costs its driver's wages, its insurance and every job it can't attend, while the garage bill is just the visible tip.

A worked example: a four-van plumbing firm out of Hersham loses a full day per van per service at a "drop it Monday, collect it when we call" garage. Eight services a year across the fleet at, say, £350 of lost billing each is £2,800 of invisible cost — far more than any difference in labour rates between garages. Compress each of those days into hours and the saving recurs every single year.

Our fleet system attacks VOR at each stage: priority slots held daily, parts on the shelf before the van arrives, evening drop-off and 8am starts, same-day default for servicing and MOT, and the mobile unit for work that can happen in your yard while the drivers carry on.

EURO 6, ULEZ and the keep-or-replace decision

Any van working the river crossings needs the ULEZ sums done: Hampton, Teddington and Kingston sit inside the zone, West Molesey just outside it, so a non-compliant diesel — broadly anything pre-Euro 6 — crossing daily picks up the charge every working day. That's over £3,000 a year per van, more than its entire servicing budget.

We help operators make the keep-or-replace call with data rather than instinct: the vehicle's measured condition, what falls due in the next 24 months (cambelt, clutch, brakes), its emissions standard from the V5C, and the charge exposure on your actual routes. Sometimes the answer is to keep the Euro 6 vans on the Hampton runs and the older ones on the Surrey side; sometimes it's to replace; occasionally a well-maintained older van is still the cheapest tool you own.

For the vans you keep, emissions health is tracked in the maintenance planner — DPF condition, AdBlue systems and EGR faults caught at service, before they become a roadside failure on the wrong side of the boundary.

Lease returns, O-licence discipline and the paperwork

End-of-contract recharges are where sloppy fleet maintenance gets expensive. Lease and contract-hire vehicles are inspected at handback against the manufacturer schedule, and a missed service or an unrecorded repair becomes a deduction. Our per-vehicle job sheets and digital service record updates exist precisely so that inspection finds nothing to charge you for.

Operators running vehicles under an O-licence, or near its thresholds, get the same discipline applied to inspections: a maintenance planner per vehicle with safety-inspection intervals, driver defect reports fed into the job system, and records retained the way a traffic examiner expects to find them.

Even outside formal compliance the planner pays for itself in fines avoided. A van caught without an MOT means a £1,000 fine and invalidated insurance — and across ten vehicles, due dates slip through the cracks of a busy office with remarkable ease. We track them so nobody in your business has to remember.