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The 30% figure comes from our own data. When we do a TCO audit for a new fleet operator, we ask them what they believe their cost per vehicle per year is. Then we run the actual calculation using all the inputs they have but hadn't consolidated. The gap is almost always between 25% and 35%. Once, it was 52%.
Ask a fleet manager what goes into their TCO and you'll typically hear: fuel, servicing, tyres, insurance, and finance charges (lease or loan repayments). That's a reasonable starting point. For a straightforward diesel fleet on a single site with consistent routes, it might get you close enough for budgeting purposes.
But close enough for budgeting and accurate enough for decisions are different standards. When you're evaluating whether to replace a vehicle early, whether to switch to a different fuel type, or whether to renegotiate a service contract, you need a number you can defend -- not one that looks right because it's consistent with last year's estimate.
These are the categories we see missing most often. Not all of them apply to every fleet, but most fleets are missing at least three.
| Cost Category | Why It Gets Missed | Typical Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Driver time in downtime events | Fleet system doesn't track driver hours during vehicle downtime | 3-8% of vehicle cost |
| Administration overhead | Fleet admin time not allocated to specific vehicles | 2-5% of fleet total |
| Incident and damage costs | Logged separately in insurance system, not in fleet ERP | 4-12% of vehicle cost |
| Infrastructure amortisation | Depot and charging infrastructure treated as sunk cost | Varies widely |
| Unplanned maintenance premium | Emergency repairs coded as standard maintenance | 5-15% of maintenance budget |
| Residual value variance | Forecast residual at acquisition vs. actual disposal value | Highly vehicle-dependent |
The incident and damage category deserves particular attention. In our experience, this is the most consistently underreported cost in fleet operations. Incident costs flow through the insurance system, which is typically managed by the finance team. They don't automatically feed back into the fleet management system. So the fleet manager sees a maintenance cost number, but the real cost of operating that vehicle -- inclusive of the claim, the excess, the repair, and the days out of service -- is fragmented across three different systems.
Every vehicle acquisition is based on a projected residual value at end of term. That projection is made at the point of acquisition, typically by a leasing company or fleet procurement team, and it's built into the monthly lease rate or the depreciation schedule.
The actual disposal value, when it comes, is almost never what was projected. The gap can go either way, but in periods of rapid technology change -- such as the current EV transition -- it tends to go the wrong way for operators who made acquisition decisions based on optimistic residuals. A diesel vehicle acquired in 2022 with a projected 2026 residual of 28% of purchase price is facing a market where that figure may now be closer to 15% due to accelerated depreciation pressure from EV competition.
This isn't a fleet ERP problem per se -- residual values are hard to predict. But a fleet ERP that tracks actual disposal values over time, correlated with vehicle specification and acquisition year, gives you real data to calibrate future projections. Most fleets don't have that historical record in a usable form.
It persists because the data that would close it lives in multiple systems that don't talk to each other. Finance has the insurance and incident data. HR has the driver time data. The leasing company has the residual value and disposal data. The maintenance provider has the breakdown and repair data. The fleet manager has the fuel card data and the telematics data.
Assembling these into a single cost per vehicle requires either a manual aggregation exercise (which happens quarterly at best, and is always out of date) or a data integration layer that pulls all of these sources into a common model in real time.
"The fleet team knows something is wrong when Finance's number is 30% higher than theirs. Neither team can explain the gap. That's the gap we fix." — ExoFleets Team
Rather than asking "what's our TCO?", the more useful question is "what's our TCO, and do we have all the inputs?" Running that audit -- even manually, once -- tends to reveal which data sources are missing and how significant they are. From there, the prioritisation of what to integrate first becomes obvious.
The fleets that get this right aren't spending more on technology. They're being more systematic about which data they're not currently capturing and why that matters. The 30% gap doesn't close overnight. But it closes a lot faster when you stop guessing at the boundaries of the problem.
ExoFleets's TCO reporting module is built to consolidate fleet cost data from multiple sources into a single, defensible number. Request a demo to see how it handles your data model.