Use Technology To Control Maintenance Costs and Drive Uptime
How to cut failure rates and identify maintenance concerns early
Penske Truck Leasing uses technology to cut failure rates and identify maintenance concerns early, which reduces overall maintenance costs while also improving customer uptime.
Maintenance is one of the top operational costs of trucking. The American Transportation Research Institute’s 2026 Operational Costs of Trucking report found that the cost per mile for repair and maintenance has increased to $0.215 in 2025, up 8.6% from the previous year and a new record high for the line item. What's more, fleet management is getting more complicated as vehicle technology advances at an increasingly rapid rate.
How Penske Is Responding to Rising Costs and Complexity
Penske has invested in its Dynamic Preventive Maintenance (Dynamic PM®) program, Proactive Diagnostics and information analysis to improve maintenance quality and timeliness, directly affecting costs and performance.
Penske’s data has shown that maintenance needs can vary throughout a vehicle’s life depending on many things, including where it operates. Now, technology lets technicians create specific action plans to provide the right maintenance at the right time, improving uptime and helping control costs.
Dynamic PM®
Using the vehicle's specs, repair history, age and application, Penske customizes preventive maintenance (PM) for each unit. When it comes in, technicians focus on the needs of the unit at that given point and time in its life and perform thorough inspections on certain components at certain ages based on failure analysis data. That approach mitigates cost and reduces unscheduled shop visits.Penske also integrates voice technology into the PM program, enabling technicians to receive voice prompts via a headset that directs them through a detailed series of inspection steps. That ensures technicians don't miss any steps within a Dynamic PM.Proactive Diagnostics
To stay ahead of vehicle breakdowns before they happen, Penske uses Proactive Diagnostics to identify potential maintenance concerns before they become larger problems. The maintenance team uses technology and artificial intelligence to analyze large amounts of vehicle and maintenance data and develop specific scenarios associated with potential breakdowns, compliance issues or concerns that could affect driver comfort.
When connected-vehicle data matches one of these scenarios, the system generates a proactive diagnostics alert. This alert is sent to Penske’s maintenance facility and is also visible directly to customers in the maintenance section of Fleet Insight™. From there, the maintenance team coordinates with the customer to schedule service at a convenient time, helping address developing issues with minimal disruption to operations.
This early visibility gives fleets more time to plan maintenance and address potential issues before they lead to unexpected downtime.
Data Analysis
Along with data from the Dynamic PM and Proactive Diagnostics programs, Penske works with its original equipment partners and draws on its extensive repair history database to identify reliability trends and analyze engine-generated failure codes. Penske’s team studies fault-code scenarios and repair patterns to determine whether something is about to fail. This allows the team to schedule the repair versus the vehicle scheduling the repair because it breaks down, reducing over-the-road breakdowns, cutting costs and eliminating unnecessary shop visits.Proactive Technology Keeps Trucks on the Road Longer
Keeping trucks running between shop visits has become more important and more difficult industry-wide. ATRI's 2026 report also found that the average mileage between unscheduled repairs or breakdowns fell to 36,891 miles in 2025, down from 38,249 in 2024, as average truck age and annual mileage both increased.
By working with various technologies, original equipment manufacturers and component partners, Penske can spec accessories or components that help drive uptime, fuel economy and driver retention.
An example of this is using telematics in conjunction with either a tire pressure monitoring system or an automatic tire inflation system. Penske can identify tires that are losing air and will eventually fail if action is not taken. In addition to increasing uptime, proper tire inflation also benefits customers by helping to improve fuel economy.