Cutting roadside breakdowns

Most roadside breakdowns come from a short list of causes, and most of them were detectable on a walk round or a service. The work is not clever: find out what actually stops your vehicles, then check whether anything in your programme would have caught it.

The usual causes

Across commercial fleets the same items recur, and they are all things somebody could have seen.

• •Tyres: pressure, damage and wear
• •Batteries and charging, especially in the first cold week
• •Electrical faults, connectors and lighting
• •Cooling system: hoses, leaks and low coolant
• •Brakes and air systems
• •Fluid leaks that were visible on the ground for a week

Do the analysis that nobody does

For every roadside breakdown, ask one question and record the answer: would the daily inspection or the last service have caught this? Three answers come back, and each has a different fix.

• •Yes, and it was not checked: the inspection is not being done properly
• •Yes, and it was checked and passed: the check is not looking at the right thing
• •No, this was not detectable: accept it, and consider whether the component deserves a shorter interval

Tyres deserve their own programme

They are consistently the largest single cause and the easiest to manage. Pressure checked at a stated interval rather than by eye, tread depth recorded as a number, and a rule about when a tyre is replaced rather than a judgement at the roadside.

Batteries fail on a schedule you can predict

Battery failures cluster in the first cold weather and correlate with age. Recording battery fitting dates and testing them properly in autumn, rather than looking at them, removes a predictable seasonal spike.

Make the walk round produce something

If a driver reports a defect and nothing visibly happens, the inspection becomes a formality within weeks and your first line of detection is gone. The loop closing is not administration. It is the mechanism.

Track the number that matters

Breakdowns per hundred thousand miles, by vehicle and by cause, trended. It normalises for fleet size, it survives a growing fleet, and it turns "we get a lot of breakdowns" into something with a direction.