Every fleet that operates its own maintenance shop effectively keeps two versions of the same story: what the truck reports while it is on the road, and what the technician records once the vehicle reaches the shop. The two records do not always line up.
Motive believes closing that information gap could be one of the most effective ways for fleets to control repair spending. The San Francisco-based company has introduced Motive Maintenance, an AI-powered system designed to bring fault codes, inspection defects, work orders and repair costs into the same platform that already manages customers’ telematics and fuel-card data.
The launch comes as carriers face mounting operating expenses. According to the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking, the average marginal cost for carriers reached $2.336 per mile in 2025, the highest figure recorded in the report’s history.
Maintenance and repair costs increased 8.6% year over year in the same dataset, adding another 2 cents per mile. The category is now 45% higher than it was in 2019, according to Fleet Maintenance. Only tolls, which rose 13.2%, posted a larger increase last year.
Non-fuel costs reached $1.854 per mile, surpassing the previous $1.78 record cited by Motive from 2024. While fuel remains one of the industry’s most closely watched expenses, maintenance costs continue to build underneath the surface.
Much of that pressure is coming from the parts market. Parts prices increased 3.7% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2025, while labor costs declined 0.4%, according to the latest Decisiv/TMC Parts & Labor Service Benchmark Report. Parts costs have risen 23.8% since early 2020, according to the same dataset.
Motive’s report estimates that the average U.S. heavy-duty truck generates $16,192 in annual repair and maintenance costs, based on ATRI’s 2024 figures. After another year of 8.6% growth, that benchmark is already a year behind the current cost environment.
Maintenance Has Become a Leading Fleet Concern
Motive’s own research, conducted with FreightWaves Research during the second quarter of 2026, provides a closer look at where fleets are experiencing the greatest pressure.
Rising maintenance and repair costs were identified as the leading operational challenge by 80% of respondents. Driver recruitment and retention followed at 60%, while fuel cost management and fraud prevention were each cited by 50% as major concerns.
The research also highlights a significant technology gap. Just 13% of respondents said their fleet technology systems were well integrated and automatically shared data between platforms.
“In general when you look at what is top of mind for fleets, it’s very clear that maintenance is coming out as the top topic primarily because of rising repair costs,” said Sriteja Kolluri, who leads the maintenance product at Motive, in an interview with FreightWaves.
“One of the important data points there is how many of them have well-integrated systems that actually communicate data automatically. That answer is only 13%, which means a huge number of fleets have disconnected systems or spreadsheets that they use and they don’t talk to each other.”
Where Fleet Repair Costs Actually Hide
For fleets, the largest costs can emerge in the space between scheduled maintenance and unexpected breakdowns.
Reactive repairs can cost three to nine times more than planned preventive maintenance, according to Decisiv/TMC service benchmark data. The report also cited breakdown data from FleetNet America.
Kolluri illustrated what that difference can mean for a large operation by using a hypothetical 1,000-truck fleet.
“If you actually calculate that for a fleet with a thousand vehicles, with almost $760 a day and almost 8 to 9 days of breakdown per vehicle, that’s almost $4 million that they spend in downtime,” he said.
The figures are based on FleetNet America and TMC roadside maintenance data showing 8.7 days of unplanned downtime per vehicle annually, with lost productivity estimated at between $448 and $760 per day.
Turning a Cryptic Fault Code Into a Work Order
Before Motive Maintenance, a critical fault code could generate an alert in one system while the resulting maintenance work had to be scheduled somewhere else.
“You have a vehicle that’s on the road which has broken down, or there’s a critical fault code that has just occurred. Today, before this release, that data is just an alert that goes to the fleet manager,” Kolluri said.
“With this, what happens is that alert basically translates into a work order that the maintenance shop can actually prioritize. So that’s basically the bridge that we’re building here.”
The ability to interpret fault codes is a key part of that process. Instead of leaving technicians with a string of diagnostic information, Motive’s system converts the code into plain language and attaches a severity ranking.
That means the resulting description can help determine whether a truck needs to enter the shop immediately or can be scheduled for a later date.
The system also connects maintenance information with fuel spending through the Motive Card, although the card itself does not cover repair costs.
“The Motive Card basically gives you the fuel spend data. Then with work orders you’re actually capturing the maintenance data as well. So both put together basically gives you your accurate cost per mile per asset,” Kolluri said.
The Prediction Problem Is Also an Integration Problem
The research suggests fleets are still struggling to identify which vehicles are most likely to experience a failure.
Some 67% of respondents said they have difficulty predicting which vehicles are at risk of failure or unplanned downtime, making it the most frequently cited maintenance pain point in the study.
The gap is particularly visible when comparing adoption of different forms of fleet technology. AI-driven driver safety monitoring is already in production at 88% of fleets that responded to that question. Predictive or condition-based maintenance, by contrast, has reached just 20% adoption, while 60% of respondents said they were not using it at all.
The biggest obstacle to extracting more value from AI was a lack of internal expertise or IT resources, cited by 33% of respondents.
Without integrated systems, manual work continues to fill the gap. Around 29% of respondents estimated that their teams spend between 11 and 20 hours each week re-entering telematics information into maintenance software, reconciling fuel transactions and updating inspection records. Another 29% said they had never measured how much time their teams spend on those tasks.
“The data already exists out there. [DVIR] inspections exist, fault codes exist, your schedules exist, but nobody’s actually bringing all that information together and giving you a complete picture of your fleet health,” Kolluri said.
“It’s difficult for fleets to do health monitoring when you have to download all this data from different systems and do VLOOKUPs and whatnot.”
TCO Has Long Relied on Tribal Knowledge
The lack of consolidated information becomes particularly important when fleets calculate total cost of ownership.
Difficulty tracking the true cost of ownership on a per-vehicle basis was reported by 67% of respondents. Meanwhile, 40% identified a single dashboard showing per-vehicle TCO across every spending category as the most desirable solution.
More than half of respondents, or 53%, said reducing total maintenance and repair costs per vehicle would have a greater impact on profitability over the next 12 to 24 months than any other change.
Without a complete picture of those costs, fleet managers can end up relying heavily on experience and institutional knowledge when deciding whether a vehicle should be repaired or replaced.
“When a vehicle breaks down, do I need to replace it or do I need to repair it. This is again another important piece that comes in with the TCO visibility coming in. 67% of the fleets actually are not able to bring this data together in time,” Kolluri said.
Motive Maintenance is the company’s seventh product on its platform and is now available in the United States and Canada.
Motive’s 2026 ROI report found an average vehicle uptime improvement of 18% among respondents.
For fleets adopting the system, however, the ultimate measure will be whether better information actually translates into lower repair bills.
“Before Motive Maintenance, what happened on the road and what happened in the shop were two separate records,” said Luke Crawley, fleet manager at H&R Agri-Power.
“Rather than paying emergency rates when something fails, we’ll be able to fix issues early, run higher uptime, save hundreds of hours a week, and spend far less to keep our fleet moving.”
