How to right-size your fleet without risking missed stops

There are better ways to ensure daily dispatch than keeping costly backups. Learn how to identify “zombie assets,” improve vehicle availability and safely right-size to cut costs.

Feb 5, 2026

Key Insights

"Assigned" assets often hide operational gaps. Prioritizing dispatch-ready vehicle availability as a key performance indicator helps you guarantee capacity at the start of the shift.
Fear of breakdowns creates fleet bloat. By auditing your “insurance vehicles” — the spares kept just in case maintenance fails — you identify assets ripe for liquidation or redeployment.
Invisible waste drains budget and maintenance hours. Examine the bottom 10% of fleet activity to force a strategic choice on every underperforming asset: either fix the reliability issue or sell the unit.

It’s the universal moment of chaos every operations manager knows too well. The dispatch board is set, the drivers are ready and the customer commitments are locked in. Then, the calls start coming in and suddenly, you’re scrambling to reshuffle loads, risking late departures and missed windows.

To prevent this, many fleets hold spare vehicles. These assets feel like a safety net, but they are actually expensive “insurance vehicles” covering for unreliable availability. By measuring true dispatch-ready capacity, you can cut the bloat and fix the root causes of morning chaos.

Step 1: Define ‘dispatch-ready availability’

A vehicle parked at a facility for five days a week may be technically "assigned," but operational reality says it is dead weight. To maximize asset utilization, you must hold every asset — ICE, EV or hybrid — to a strict dispatch-ready standard. To be considered available, a unit must be:

Compliant: Current on inspections, DVIRs and regulatory checks
Mechanically sound: No active critical fault codes
Fueled up: Sufficient fuel or, for EVs, a State of Charge (SOC) above your threshold (e.g., >70%) to complete the route
Auxiliary ready: Essential equipment (PTO, reefer units, liftgates) is fully functional

The 95% Rule

If your fleet’s active utilization is below 95%, you are carrying excess inventory. You are paying registration, insurance and depreciation on assets that simply sit in the yard waiting for another vehicle to break.

Step 2: Run a 90-day capacity and coverage audit

You can’t manage what you don't audit. Pull your telematics data for the last 90 days, combining activity metrics (miles/hours) with availability indicators (fault severity, charging history, location adherence).

Sort the list from highest activity to lowest. Ignore the top performers and focus entirely on the bottom 10%. For every unit in that bottom tier, force a binary diagnosis:

Is it down/unreliable? If the asset is sitting because it is frequently in the shop, awaiting parts or tripping faults, you have a reliability problem. This unit is a liability that creates service failures.
Is it unwanted? If the asset is healthy but rarely moves, or sits at a branch with low volume, you have a placement problem.

This output shouldn't be a report; it should be a decision list.

Step 3: Decide fast – redeploy, retire, repair

Once you have identified the bottom 10%, take immediate action.

Redeploy

If a healthy asset is sitting at a low-volume branch while another location is renting units to meet demand, move it. Redeploying stranded assets is the cheapest capacity you will ever "buy."

Retire

If you can't redeploy it, sell it. Removing true excess delivers immediate cost reductions. You eliminate insurance premiums, registration fees, parking congestion and fueling/charging overhead. Crucially, you reduce the time-based preventive maintenance workload. Every hour your shop spends inspecting a parked spare is an hour stolen from maintaining your revenue generators.

Repair

If you find you are keeping spares solely because you are afraid your core fleet will break down, you must mandate a change in maintenance strategy. Shift to predictive maintenance to reduce unscheduled downtime. When you use data to prioritize faults and predict failures before they happen, you gain the confidence to run lean without risking service levels.

Reliability wins business

In a competitive market, availability is your strongest sales tool. Customers don't care how many vehicles you own; they care if the product arrives on time.

Fleets that consistently start at 100% of planned capacity hit service levels, protect customer windows and avoid costly reschedules. Drivers feel the difference: fewer hot swaps, less scavenger hunting for road‑ready units and tighter, calmer starts to the day. Reliability builds trust with customers and crews — and trust renews contracts.

So stop managing your fleet size based on emotion; start managing dispatch-ready capacity with data. By auditing your utilization and enforcing a strict standard for availability, you can liquidate the dead weight and build a fleet that is leaner, more profitable and more reliable.

Ready to reduce your fleet costs?

Download our guide, How to make maintenance your fleet’s competitive advantage, to learn the full blueprint for availability KPIs, predictive maintenance and automated workflows.