How predictive maintenance helps bus workshops cut downtime and costs

Municipal buses are often worked around the clock, and passenger transportation fleets commonly operate with no or very few replacement vehicles. This makes maintaining vehicle condition paramount both for ensuring passenger safety and for complying with stringent performance contracts. This blog article explores how predictive maintenance, powered by advanced vehicle diagnostic insights, empowers engineering teams to stay ahead of faults, enhance bus condition and significantly reduce costly downtime.

Where preventative maintenance falls short

Many engineering teams operate a preventative maintenance programme, with buses scheduled for periodic inspections and services, and the workshop relying on drivers to notify them of fault lights. Unfortunately, this onus on driver reporting means many faults go unreported. As the buses continue to be driven, these issues worsen and can lead to breakdowns.

The result is costly, service-impacting repairs, longer downtime due to their unplanned nature, and higher expenses from the greater severity of the faults and the need to hire replacement vehicles. This is where predictive maintenance offers a step-change.

Predictive maintenance - identifying minor issues before they escalate

With a predictive maintenance programme, engineers use real-time vehicle diagnostic trouble code (DTC) information and granular data points, sent directly from the bus telematics devices to their maintenance software. This enables the team to monitor and optimise vehicle health actively, and to ensure buses are fit for the start of every shift.

With Geotab and its integrated Marketplace partners, workshops gain access to diagnostic monitoring solutions that offer the most detailed vehicle health insights on the market.  The rules engine makes this data available through dashboards or notifications, empowering workshops to act in the moment. Crucially, the data is highly granular - showing not just which vehicles have faults, but also the exact nature of each issue. 

With these insights, engineers can triage minor issues in priority order, reducing the likelihood of major faults that risk impacting performance contracts and that take longer and cost more to repair.

Protecting against safety-critical failures  

Bus engines are under heavy strain, increasing the probability of major safety events. For diesel buses, overheating is a serious concern, often caused by faults in engine cooling systems that allow temperatures to exceed safe working levels.

With MyGeotab, engineering teams can monitor the diagnostic trouble codes that serve as early warning indicators of a faulty cooling system. The workshop can be alerted in real-time if engine temperature, engine oil, or coolant temperature exceeds specific thresholds, allowing immediate intervention before a major incident occurs.

Battery electric buses (BEBs) should also be closely monitored to prevent the risk of battery fires. A critical indicator for engineering teams is the voltage of the battery cells, a metric that MyGeotab uniquely tracks.

Driving reliability, safety and cost efficiency

By moving from preventative to predictive maintenance, engineering teams gain the ability to act before faults escalate into breakdowns. The result is a bus fleet that is safer, more reliable and consistently available for service, reducing operational costs and ensuring that passenger contracts are met without disruption. With advanced diagnostic insights and predictive alerts at their fingertips, workshops can maximise fleet uptime and keep vehicles on the road where they belong.

Want to move to predictive maintenance to keep your buses safer, healthier and on the road? Check out our demo or speak to our experts today.