What does a van off the road actually cost you?

The four costs a breakdown actually bills you for

Everybody counts the repair. The repair is usually the small half of it. Here is the honest stack, in the order the money leaves:

1 · The route that didn't run. This is the number only you know, and it's why this page asks instead of assuming. A last-mile van doing 120 stops and a plumbing van doing four calls have completely different day rates, and a "fleet downtime costs $X per day" statistic from a US whitepaper tells you nothing about either.

2 · The people you're paying anyway. The driver still gets paid. Somebody in the office spends an afternoon on the phone with a tow operator and a shop. That's real payroll spent on a van sitting still.

3 · Breakdown-price repair. Work you didn't schedule gets done on somebody else's terms, the closest shop, their queue, their rate, and a tow to get there. The same job caught in your yard on a Tuesday evening is the same parts and the same labour at a published price.

4 · The customer who called someone else. Not quantifiable, which is exactly why it isn't in the calculator. But every operator reading this already knows what a missed commitment costs the second time it happens.

What scheduled yard PM actually changes

Be clear about the claim, because the industry usually isn't: preventive maintenance does not abolish breakdowns. Components fail at random and no honest mechanic will promise otherwise. What it removes is the boring failure, and the boring failures are most of them. A battery that tested weak in the yard in October instead of dying on the first cold morning in January. Brake pads caught at 3 mm with a photo, instead of metal-on-metal and a warped rotor. A coolant stain logged as a stain, before it's a temperature gauge on the 401.

The second thing it changes is scheduling. When every unit has its own service history, "which van is due?" stops being a conversation and becomes a date. You also find the unit that keeps eating front brakes, and that's usually a driver conversation, not a parts problem.

The part you're legally required to have anyway

Ontario requires commercial operators to run a documented preventive-maintenance program with records. Not "we fix things when they break", documented, per unit, with a paper trail. Every unit serviced at your yard gets a photo condition report filed to its own digital service history: what was done, when, at what mileage, with photos. That artifact is the compliance paper trail, and it builds itself as a by-product of the wrench work, nobody on your team does paperwork for it. The full rules, plainly.

What the maintenance side costs, published

Every rate in the calculator comes from the published fleet rate card: $129 per gas van or $169 per diesel/Euro van per PM visit, full synthetic oil and filter, 50-point photo inspection, fluids topped, tire pressures set and tread logged, battery and charging test, per-unit digital report. At 10 or more units in one visit the volume rate ($119 / $159) applies automatically. Three-vehicle minimum per yard visit. Brakes from $269 an axle with pads installed, from $449 with rotors. Batteries from $289 installed. Diagnostics $99 flat, credited into the repair. Flat prices, no tax line, no hourly rate, the number on the card is the number on the invoice. The full cost breakdown, per van, per month.