It pays to invest in first-time passes
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Saving money buying a used truck is all well and good, but you need to reinvest some of it in the vehicle if you want to continue cutting costs Buying and running older trucks is a calculated risk, as highlighted by the recent publication of Vosa's Annual Effectiveness Report (CM 21 February). First-time pass rates reached a new high — 75.3% — for the 12 months to 31 March 2012.
Closer scrutiny of the figures shows that 92% of all trucks less than 12 months old passed first time, compared with only 67.1% of 10-year-old trucks.
When you consider that the first-time pass rate for fleets with more than 100 vehicles is 89.5%, while fleets and owner-drivers with fewer than 10 trucks have a pass rate of 67.7%, a clear pattern emerges. Big shiny fleets with newer trucks have a better first-time pass rate than one-man-bands running older trucks.
With a better scale of economy, large companies pay less per vehicle than smaller operators, so how can you reduce costs and up the first-time pass rate of your second-hand vehicles?
The answer is preventative maintenance. If you are going to save money up front by spending less on a second-hand truck than on a new model, you have a duty of care to reinvest some of that saving into a system that checks the operational condition of your truck, and prevents faults 'going live'.
If nothing goes wrong, it's money lost to a good cause; but if it catches something, you avoid paying for a retest, a breakdown, increased downtime, recovery costs, insurance hikes, and so on.
The biggest single defect for failure is headlamp aim. Other lamp faults came second, followed by service brake performance and brake system components. If you are going to run older trucks, sort out the lamps and brakes, it'll improve your chances and lower your costs.