Episode 019: Total Cost of Ownership & Its Impact on Procurement

In this episode of the Fleet Success Show, host Josh Turley is joined by Jeff Jenkins and Steve Salzgiver to explore how Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) shapes fleet procurement decisions. After celebrating the podcast’s 1,000‑download milestone, the trio defines TCO as the intersection of fixed (ownership) costs—primarily depreciation, insurance, and administration—and variable (operational) costs such as fuel, maintenance, tires, and oil changes. They explain how these cost curves evolve over a vehicle’s life, creating a “sweet‑spot” where ownership and operational expenses meet, and discuss how warranty periods, resale value, and catastrophic failure risk influence the optimal replacement window (typically a 2‑3‑year window recommended by NAFCA). The conversation moves to practical measurement issues: standardizing fuel cost, accounting for usage variance, and using cost‑per‑mile or gallons‑consumed metrics to avoid misleading averages. They stress the importance of right‑sizing fleets by identifying under‑utilized assets through standard deviation analysis and suggest that sometimes the best replacement strategy is to eliminate the vehicle altogether. Leasing versus buying is examined, with leasing framed as converting CapEx to predictable OpEx and smoothing cost spikes. The hosts also discuss alternative acquisition strategies, including buying one‑year‑old used vehicles to capture depreciation upside, and the “glider” approach—refurbishing chassis/engine combos with new cabs—to bypass costly emissions regulations (DEF systems) and reduce TCO. Real‑world anecdotes from a Utah university’s fleet, city off‑road equipment programs, and the impact of EPA/CAFE regulations on trucking costs are shared. Throughout, they invite listener questions via email, emphasizing that opinions are subjective and encouraging audience engagement. The episode concludes with a recap of key takeaways on TCO‑driven procurement, right‑sizing, and strategic asset management.
Chapters
Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success.
Let's get into the show.
All right. Welcome back to another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, joined again by my cohorts and colleagues, Jeff Jenkins, Steve Salzgiver.
Hey there.
Hell yeah.
How you guys doing today?
Good. Doing great.
Been getting some awesome rain down in the valley.
Yeah, it's been, been awesome.
A little muggy times, but I think I saw we were up to like 78% humidity. It was just astronomical.
Oh my gosh, it's been— I've actually gone home and moved up my air conditioning because I'm cold. So I'm finally acclimatizing to Arizona.
Listen, until you get to that Houston humidity Yeah, this is nothing.
This is nothing.
This is—
well, it dries up so fast too, you know, within 2 or 3 days. Yeah, it goes back to 10%, which is where it should be. So, uh, a couple things before we get started. I want to just, you know, congratulate you guys. Thanks for being a part of this journey. We've hit 1,000 downloads for the podcast, which is, uh, it's quite the milestone for us. And I want to just give you guys a little shout out and say thank you.
It's awesome.
Thank you to listeners who keep coming back for more punishment every single week. We love having you guys listen to us, and one of the things that we want to do is we want to start opening it up and having a little bit more interactiveness. So if you guys have any questions, topics you guys want to see us tackle, email any of your questions or comments. You know, if you want to send us your hate mail, we'll take that too. The email address to send that is podcast@rtafleet.com. So send that over, we'll get that, read it, we'll might ignore it, might bring it into the show. No promises, but we'd love to hear from you guys.
And we could always use some new topics.
Exactly. That'd be great.
We— the point of this is to try and help you guys as a listener. So if there's something we haven't touched on that you want us to touch on, that you would like some tips or tools or whatever, we're more than happy to delve into it.
Yeah. And we have a list of topics that we're always kind of looking at and saying, oh, should we talk about this this week or this this week? Hearing you guys and having a voice in that would be a huge help for us to know what's important, what's pertinent, right? What's relevant for you guys right now? Where you guys, where's your mindset at? So today, today's topic, we're going to talk a little bit about TCO procurement, going out and buying vehicles, you know, when to replace them, more around just the actual, you know, asset management side of fleet.
Right.
And there's, there's a lot of resources out on this, but we wanted to kind of dive into it, give you our opinions on different ways, different things you could do. Maybe you haven't thought about them. Maybe you want to hear what somebody's experience has been with some of these different options. So, Steve, one of the things that we always look at when we talk about vehicle replacement strategies, when do I get a new vehicle, when do I replace a vehicle, is TCO.
Right.
How do you define TCO?
Well, typically you, uh, you try and— well, the first thing I'd say is you try and keep costs flat in fleet. That's the one thing fleet managers are tasked with. And I, I've always, you know, people are saying, you know, am I saving money? No, you're trying to keep costs flat.
And by flat, you mean like predictable?
Yeah, predictable. Uh, what you're trying to avoid is huge peaks and valleys if you're looking at a graph, because that's unpredictable, and anything unpredictable is costly. That's the problem. So I've always said it's really where your operational costs and your ownership costs meet on a, on a graph at a certain year, right? So you have, for example, on the vertical axis you've got costs and on the horizontal axis you've got time. And so about where they meet is typically where that sweet spot is. And you'll have about, you'll have a little bit of a trough with about 1 to 3 years there where you have an opportunity. And so what you're trying to do, and the reason you use that, what you're trying to do is avoid at all costs a catastrophic failure, because once that happens, then you've really basically either rebuild the vehicle again and then put it on a new life cycle, or you just don't rebuild it and just sell it for junk, right? Because then you got no residual value, right?
You scrapped it at that point, right?
Yeah.
So when you're talking about TCO though, what are the costs that, that go into kind of making these these decisions?
Yeah, typically ownership costs are those costs like depreciation, insurance, administration, costs that are really fixed costs.
Okay.
And then you've got your operational costs that are variable costs, you know, like fuel, maintenance costs vary, things like tires, brakes, oil changes, things like that. Right. And that's where that comparison on the chart comes into play. Okay. You know, and operational costs typically go up. And ownership costs typically go down.
As the vehicle gets old.
As the vehicle ages, yeah.
Okay. So we'll see like a fixed cost will come down.
Right.
Starts high, goes low.
Right.
Operational costs will go up.
Yeah.
The majority of your fixed costs are really depreciation.
Okay.
You know, I mean, obviously insurance and some of those things are not going to be declining typically, but a big chunk of fixed costs are depreciation that ranges from 50 to 70% of your whole cost of your operation. Or your vehicle. Okay.
Jeff, you guys in trucking, TCO, a term you guys use quite a bit. Did you guys look at it a lot or is pretty much fixed because, you know, like the assets last for a lot longer?
Well, it depends on the company's philosophy. So most major trucking companies do a turn cycle every 3 years regardless. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter the shape of the equipment. It's because drivers want to stay in newer equipment. It's still under warranty. You can resell it and and it still has some of that warranty value on who's buying it, and you have a lot less maintenance costs. The moment you get past that 3-year mark, what you notice on the transportation side is you start having things become more of a problem. Um, and once it gets outside of warranty, it's even worse. So that's why they say, okay, we're going to stop it right about 3 years, a little bit before 3 years. And typically, you know, you've got less than 300,000 miles on that truck at that point. But you'll do that because I can then turn around and sell it and it'll still have some of that warranty on it. So someone buys it, they still have it under warranty, so they feel a little bit more secure as well. So it's really a— it's a game I think you play just with the market in general. Right.
Well, and typically, you know, somebody always asks me, what is the optimal sweet spot of replacing a vehicle? Well, if you think about it, the manufacturers have actually showed you what that is, right? It's follow the warranty guideline, because that's when they're unwilling to take a risk on it anymore.
Right. Like their risk appetite drops off.
Yeah, that's totally really what the life cycle is. A lot of people argue with that, but I mean, ultimately that's what you're trying to avoid is those costs.
Right. Well, it is. And even if you buy the extended warranty, right, it doesn't really do you much good because extended warranty doesn't cover most of the things that are going to break. That's why they offer the extended warranty, right?
Yeah.
Because it's the basics, right? It's not things like your engine or your transmission or anything like that.
Yeah, I remember I bought one extended warranty on a new car and it covered like the seats and the electronics, things that never broke through the whole life of the vehicle.
Right.
Yeah, it's a waste of money.
And I guess we should clarify this too. I realized this is my fault. We talked about TCO. I keep using the acronym. TCO, if you didn't know, stands for total cost of ownership. This is what the total cost is that goes into owning a vehicle. And one of the biggest challenges that we come across is, when do I replace that vehicle? You just heard a couple of opinions. You know, if I've got the vehicle cost and as soon as it's out of warranty or it's got a little bit of warranty life left in it to keep the resale value high. Steve mentioned, you know, as the operating costs come up, where they meet, you know, kind of that total cost of ownership or the fixed cost. Right? That ends up creating, if you were to graph this out on a chart, and you can go look this up online, there's a lot of good imagery on this one, is the optimum replacement lifecycle. But when those two lines cross is usually very— or about that point or shortly thereafter is the trough. That's the lowest total cost of ownership you're going to have on that unit. And NAFCA kind of recommends this too, is that there's a, like a 2 or 3-year window around that point that if you're replacing it, that's kind of the sweet spot to replace a vehicle.
You know, there's a lot of differing opinions on some of this. So I got some on, for example, fuel costs. Yeah. Do you count fuel costs? It's an operational cost. Some people do, some people omit it. Some people include the differential in fuel costs. Like if you go from 8 miles a gallon a year on a truck to 10, then that differential of 2 miles a gallon should be counted because you got an increase, right?
Right.
So if you're going to include fuel costs, my opinion would be to keep things normal is to do a standard cost multiplied by the gallons, the usage, fuel usage, right? So that way, if you are having a vehicle that's more efficient than another and you're comparing that, you're comparing them apples to apples, not based on historical fuel cost.
Yeah.
Or maybe you got a really good deal, like Southwest knew, had this going for them during the first down where they're able to lock in a really low fuel cost.
Fuel hedging.
Maybe you were able to do that. You fuel hedged, right? You don't want that advantage keeping you from making a decision you should be able to make, right? And so making sure that the data is accurate. So usually we'll pick like an index and say, look, our fuel cost for the analysis portion, maybe it's $3 today. You know, next year I'll do it. It might be a $4, but every vehicle, when I look at the history, uses that same fuel cost. What changes, though, each vehicle is going to have a dynamic usage.
Yeah, right.
And the usage will then dictate what the fuel cost is, the total fuel cost for that vehicle. But we're at least going to level set so that the, you know, the price of—
and that's a good, that's a good, a good, good example. I mean, if you have vehicles that vary on utilization, it's going to impact your, your TCO.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, there's a lot of people that, you know, theoretically to do an optimal replacement analysis, You really have to do one vehicle at a time because they're independent. A lot of people do classes of vehicles and things like that, but you're really doing an average usage of all those vehicles, which I remember years ago, I think it was Tony Vercelli, used to be the PepsiCo fleet manager years ago. I went to a class, he said, average is, you know, head in the oven, feet in the refrigerator. So I've always kind of kept that in the back of my mind. That's the difference of using an average. So as you go forward, you might want to think about those things, you know, as if you've got some huge data swings. Look for outliers. Yeah, yeah. Look for that.
Well, because when you talk about fuel, depends on how you're driving.
Who the driver is.
Yeah, who the driver is. It depends on the state of the equipment, your tires, right? How much tread you have on them. Are they even wear? I mean, there's a lot of factors that goes into fuel consumption.
Air pressure.
Yeah. So it's very, very hard to take an average and be like, hey, this is what it is, because you could have, you know, 20% of your fleet that is just awful, 80% that is decent, and you average them out and you're like, ah, you know, we're doing okay. As opposed to going and saying, hey, let's fix this 20%. What's wrong here?
Right. So that's a decision you have to look at when you look at the data. Does it make sense? Are we getting similar use between all the vehicles? Or do we have a lot of outliers and there's too much variation, right? You look at standard deviations from the curve, that kind of thing when you're looking at averages. If you don't include fuel costs, you know, that same example I applied with picking a number should apply to things like labor hours, right? Because as inflation happens, as wages go up, you don't want to necessarily penalize newer vehicles when comparing them to older vehicles about when to replace them. So using as much standardization and just changing out things that are variable is a good way to control for that. I have an opinion about that replacement curve, and it's not popular, right? Like, I haven't had anybody say, oh my gosh, that's the most brilliant thing. I'm still waiting for that day. So if you agree with me, podcast@rtafleet.com. I would love to hear it. If you disagree, I'd love to hear that too. But my theory is actually because I've seen these charts and I know how much depreciation you eat in the first and second years of owning a vehicle, it's astronomical, right? Like almost all the vehicle, all the value of a vehicle comes off in those first two years. And so if you're replacing it by the time the vehicle has finally gotten to the lowest point of owner, of total cost of ownership, and then you immediately replace it, you're missing out on all the upswing to get you back to that high point of the, of the depreciation. So my theory is actually to not do it at that point but to keep that vehicle around as long as that total cost of ownership is lower than the total depreciation within reason. And this is where the risk comes in, right? Is the longer you go, the more likely you are to have a catastrophic failure. And so doing analysis on that to figure out, okay, well, these vehicles are actually really good until 8 years. Their TCO minimum might be 6, but if I extend it another 7, 8 year, then I'm capturing everything that's under the curve, is what I like to call it, right? There's a, there's an area under the curve, and I'm capturing that low cost by extending the life of that vehicle. A lot of people would disagree with that, but if you are going to go past warranty period, that's a—
well, that could also bring in that other factor that you've talked about. I think it's you that's talked about it, where you buy a used vehicle and you take away some of that depreciation up front.
Oh, right.
You have a 1-year-old vehicle, so you don't drive off the lot and lose all that depreciation, which is—
So Dave Ramsey says this for your personal vehicles.
Yeah.
And I'm curious to hear if people have done this in fleet where they actually go out and buy used vehicles instead of buying new and they get to— they don't have the depreciation hit that you do with a brand new vehicle.
Be interesting. Yeah.
Yeah. Here's my two cents on your opinion.
Perfect.
I love it.
Let's do this.
Um, one, you're not wrong completely. No, I'm just kidding. You're not really wrong. So the problem is when you measure in time as opposed to usage. So it's great to say 8 years, but what if you're driving 5,000 miles a year every year for 8 years? Well, you don't have a used— a beat-up used piece of equipment, as opposed to if you're driving it, you do 60,000 a year and every year for 8 years. There's a difference. You've got to look at that, like, especially when you're talking about, you know, fleet, not necessarily trucking, but when you talk about fleet, you know, uh, trucks and cars and that sort of thing, there's still a lot of value and you can stretch out that TCO if you're not using it as frequent because a lot of these don't rack up the big miles, right?
Especially a lot of the city fleets, right?
So, so if you're looking at it just based on a time frame, just years, it's not the right way to do it. You have to look at it also on the usage of that vehicle. But not only that, you can also go and take a different measurement. So in trucking, the measurement we do is cost per mile when it comes to your maintenance, right? And you can just talk— or the TCO, whatever you want to call it. If you add that in there as well, you can also see those ebbs and flows of how much certain vehicles are costing you. And that also gets you into that cadence of, okay, well, this one's costing me 50% more per mile than this one, so it's probably a good item to replace, not buy that brand anymore, or maybe it's just a lemon, who knows. So you've got to look at other metrics as well as opposed to just being pigeonholed into just time.
Right. Well, that's a good, that's a good point too. I mean, there's nothing to stop you from changing the horizontal axis, right? To, you know, for hours or miles or anything, if that's a better metric for you. I ran into a guy a while back that was using gallons consumed of fuel.
Oh, Grandpa was a huge proponent of gallons consumed. Consumed. Loved it.
Yeah, huge metric because that, that's, that's the real usage is gallons consumed.
Well, especially if you've got PTO, you know, power takeoff units. Yeah, right. Um, he was a big proponent for PMs tracking it with gallons.
Yep.
So not a lot of people do that, but it's, it's underutilized.
Well, you do it, you do it in trucking, right? You measure idle time, right? Um, it's just one of those things because you sleep in your truck and you let it run. So that's a big measurement. A lot of drivers get paid bonuses off of limited idle time, so it's not consuming as many gallons.
I think the one of the things you mentioned, and this is one of the things I think we ignore a little bit when it comes to deciding when to replace a vehicle, is you talked about cost per mile and how that could vary, right? And usage could vary. I think one of the best ways to lower your overall cost of ownership is to identify, do you even need that vehicle anymore?
Right?
If you've looked at CPM and you have a vehicle that's underutilized, the best replacement strategy might be none. It might be not to replace it because maybe the cost per mile is high because remember that fixed cost doesn't go anywhere even if you don't drive the vehicle. So your cost per mile is kind of this equalizer and you realize, wow, this is really high. Well, it's because we're not using it. Oh, well, maybe we should get rid of it. Steve, you said this at an AFAS event a long time ago. It stuck with me for a long time, right? Before we really ever knew each other and talked about how sometimes the right move is to right-size, right? Right-size your fleet instead of doing all these replacements.
I was actually having that conversation this morning as we were looking at some things here in the office. The worst thing you can do, honestly, is to buy the vehicle, the asset. That's the worst decision. You know how to make sure you need that before you do it.
Right.
I mean, if you're in a city fleet and you don't think you're going to anticipate a whole bunch of miles, Maybe it's better to use rideshare. Maybe it's better to use a motor pool. Maybe it's better to pay personal loan mileage reimbursement, right? So you kind of have to look at all the gamut of all the different tools you have in your toolbox, you know, and the last one should be don't buy the vehicle if you don't need it. Right. You know, that's, that's the whole point. Cause once you get the vehicle, it's a sunk cost, right? And then every, everything you have to put into it. That's why I've always, and you've heard me say this, that's why I always recommend leasing. Because leasing theoretically spreads out your capital, right? You don't, you don't have to, you pay for exactly what you use and you don't pay for the entire vehicle before you use anything, right?
Right.
So I've always, and that's something we used when we were in consulting, it was you either pay before you go or you pay while you go, you know, and it's just that renting, leasing principle.
Well, it kind of changes it from a CapEx decision to an OpEx.
Exactly.
And you talked about keeping the cost predictable. Well, if every year you've got a $70,000, $80,000 spike for a single piece of equipment and you could spread that out over the life of that equipment, it makes it a lot more predictable.
Some of the best run fleets are leased fleets just for that reason. You know, I had a guy tell me one time, he said, don't you think life is backwards? We own buildings and we lease, or we own vehicles and we lease buildings.
Right.
It should be exactly the opposite of that because buildings depreciate or appreciate, vehicles depreciate, right? You know, but somehow in business we've kind of screwed that up.
Well, and when you lease, especially if it's a full-service lease, your costs no longer become variable.
Yeah, they're fixed.
They're all fixed. Yeah, you know exactly every single month what you're going to pay for every vehicle you're leasing. Your maintenance is included, you know. So really, what are your costs? Your cost, it's fixed when it comes to that. And And then really you just have your fuel.
And if you're running a business, a trucking business, fixed costs are important. That's how you base your, your, you know, your margins on that, right?
Right. Well, yeah, well, it's how you do your budgets, how you forecast it. Yeah, you got to look at what your fixed costs are. The variables, what screw you over.
Yeah, exactly.
There's another thing that I think about when we talk about the replacement life cycle, and there was a university up in Utah that did an amazing job of this, and I'll tell you a story about but one of the biggest factors that come into replacement time frame is resale value. It's one of the reasons why you mentioned selling it before the warranty expires actually boosts the resale value a little bit. If you'd waited till after the warranty expires, you lose some of that resale value. There's this university, and you know, I'm not going to name who it was, but the university, they basically were able to— they'd pick up these Toyota Tundra pickups and they would get them at a fleet discount. They would use them for 2 years, and after 2 years of usage, they'd be able to sell them on the, on the private market for, on the resale market, for more than what they paid for them after their fleet discount. If they had continued using them— now these were Toyotas, so they held on to the resale value really well— had they continued using them, that resale value would have gone down and they wouldn't have captured as much as that. So not only are they getting more money back to buy new replacements, everything was under warranty because these are brand new vehicles and they're only keeping them for 2, 3 years.
Yeah.
And I thought it was—
they basically had no cost.
They had no cost.
There was a county in Utah that did the same thing for a while.
Yeah.
Um, the problem with that is it gives your accountants fits. Oh, for sure. Because they don't know what to do with that.
You know, it's like, I'm going to recognize profit.
I was a city fleet manager. We did this. We did that with all of our off-road equipment. Backhoes, loaders, graders. We would go out and we would do a bid and they'd basically, 'cause you get a discount up front, right? They'd basically give you, say, a backhoe for a dollar a year. And then at the end of that year, if you stayed within a certain amount of hours on it, they could sell it to the secondary market and give you another one. And you basically paid a dollar for that whole year.
'Cause—
Right.
And that's huge.
'Cause you got the discount that for a city discount, it was, it was awesome.
And, and you think about that.
Yeah.
We talked about the the biggest cost of any fleet, of owning any asset, it's not fuel, it's not tires, it's capital, it's depreciation.
Exactly.
That's the biggest cost. And if you can eliminate that or somehow find a way to reverse it like this university did, that's a great advantage you can grab. So if you hadn't thought about that, that might be another thing to look at. Steve, you already talked about this lease versus buy decision. Sorry, go ahead.
No, I was just gonna say right now, actually, with the way the economy is, used vehicles are 25%. So it'd be a good time to get rid of Well, because you don't sell your vehicle, then you got to go get a new one.
It's like the housing market. It's like the housing market in Arizona.
That's why I caveat that with ones you don't need.
Yeah, right. If you can right-size them, it's a great time to sell and downsize your fleet. Yeah, it's like buying a house in Arizona. You could sell your house today, but then you got to go buy a new one at the same inflated price. One of the things that you guys have talked about, a different option for, you know, buying a vehicle or replacing a vehicle is not necessarily to replace a vehicle, but it's this, the gliders in trucking.
Yeah.
And so, Steve, you've looked at this. Jeff, you've actually done it. But for the audience, just explain a little bit for the non-trucking folks among us what gliders are, how they work, and why— what the advantages are.
Well, I can explain it from a city government kind of perspective.
Okay.
And then also, of course, from trucking. But I'll let Jeff take that one. A glider really is just a vehicle refurbishment for the most part. So you get to a point where, you know, you take the basically the drivetrain of the vehicle, transmission, engine, rear end, and you just put a new one in, swap it out. You know, I mean, you might go farther than, you know, might want to, you know, modify the, say, the chassis, make sure it's sound and everything like that. You might want to put a new cab on it. There's other things you can to do. But, and I have done that. I've had refurbished fire trucks years ago because it was more cost effective to do that. And I think, you know, Jeff's probably had that experience with trucking as well.
When gliders became extremely popular in trucking is back in 2010 when they started implementing the new rules where you had to have the DEF systems in trucks, right? Um, so first generation systems were trash, garbage. You'd break down all on the road all the time.
And they have regens.
Yeah. Total region. Anyway, it was bullshit. I mean, it's just, it's one of those things where the government tries rushing something in on you and then forcing you to do it even though it's a broken process. And even Generation 2 and 3, they weren't that great as well. So what, what, what these companies did is they'd go out and they'd buy these old, they'd buy these old engines and they'd refurbish them and they'd put them into a brand new cab of a truck and they now wouldn't have to be compliant with that law. Because it's an older model, so it was exempt. Yeah. Even though it's in a new truck, as long as that engine, right, was built prior to that regulation, it could still be used. So huge market, right? Guys were going out and buying, you know, junkyards were just getting pillaged for all these, these old components anyway. So it eliminated that on that side. And so we were looking at it, you know, back in 2014 And we decided we're going to go ahead and give it a try. So we bought 5 of these Gliders. We didn't have a single problem at all with these, with these trucks versus all the trucks that we had bought brand new back in 2011 and 2012 who had these DEF systems in them who we would have constant problems. We lost so much damn money when it came to having to repair those things. We even went and we decided that we were going to delete the DEF system. Which you can actually do. I don't know if you guys knew that. Yeah, you can delete the DEF system so it looks like it's actually there and it, and it looks functioning, but you can't legally sell it. You can't legally sell it, right? But we would do that just because we had so many problems, so many regen issues, and it was costing us so much money. Like, our TCO when it came to trucks that had that system on there, it quadrupled for prior to what that regulation was.
I actually did some analysis on that. You were talking about 2010. The worst years were '10 through '13. In '14, they started to turn the corner a little bit on this. In '15, they got actually fairly normalized. So that was actually an issue. I was, because I was trying to figure out in my fleet, you know, where, where are we going to get on top of this? Because it, it literally was a 25% government regulation increase for us in the trucking.
Wow.
Just to have to deal with it, you know. So, you know, and we haven't talked about regulations yet, and that's another future episode, but When you're in private business, it's quite expensive to your business to deal with all the EPA and the, the CAFE standards and all that stuff.
Yeah. And I wonder a lot of times too, has it really gotten that much better or are we just more used to it now? Are we used to the breakdowns when it comes to the regens and everything else? So it's just when it first started happening, it was every day, it was constant. It was half your fleet. So you're pissed off because nothing could ever go right, but you kind of got used to that over time. And so it became the new norm.
Well, now there's things that you're including in your PM schedules to help make sure you've trained drivers better on how to make sure they're running the vehicles correctly.
And yeah, so my diesel truck now has auto regen, you know, so I mean, there's other things that they've done that I don't have to sit on the side of the road anymore.
But it is interesting, this whole concept of the glider, right? Is that we're going to take older equipment, refurb it, and then, you know, like we're just going to swap out the cab. So it's a brand new cab, but, you know, older engine. And, you know, the engine and chassis keep rolling, right? And so we're only replacing part of the vehicle and it's the part that is the one that has the most interaction with drivers, that they're really more concerned about driving a new vehicle and a reliable vehicle than they are about, you know, how new it really is under the hood.
You know, the other thing about those regulations, they put a big company like Caterpillar out of business. I mean, there are several companies that went out of business because of this. Well, so it's, yeah, it can be costly.
All right, different episode.
Right.
But that's, uh, that's our lesson on TCO procurement. Some just different things to think about when you're looking at buying new vehicles, when to buy new vehicles. Uh, lots of opinions on this one. Uh, again, any questions you guys have, comments, hate mail, podcast@rtafleet.com is where to send those. We look forward to hearing from you. Uh, again, congratulations guys on 1,000 downloads. For the podcast episode. It's awesome to be a part of this and look forward to seeing you guys next week.
Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show.
If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review.
Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media @fleetsuccess. See you next time.
More from Josh

Episode 227: The Hidden Costs Killing Fleet Operations (It’s NOT What You Think)

Episode 225: Are Certifications Still Worth It? The Truth About ASE, CAFM & Fleet Leadership

Episode 221: The State of Fleet Management: Education, AI, and the Technician Crisis with NAFA’s CEO

Episode 220: Motor Pools Are Back: Right-Size Your Fleet Without Breaking Operations

Episode 219: Stop Guessing at Downtime: Status Strategy for Better Availability #podcast #fleet

Episode 218: Fleet Predictions 2026: AI Hype, Technician Shortages, & the Next Era of Fleet Managers

Episode 217: Why Replacement Planning Solves 95% of Your Problems #podcast #fleetmanagement #fleet



