It's ten past seven on a Tuesday and a van won't turn over. There are three jobs booked against that vehicle, a driver stood in a yard with nothing to do, and a customer who was promised a morning slot.
The part that eventually fixes it is a £140 battery. That is not the expensive bit.
The number nobody puts on the invoice
Research carried out by Opinium for Mercedes-Benz Vans in May 2026, covering 500 senior decision makers at businesses that run vans, put the cost of a van being unavailable at £1,172.20 a day. The same research found the average business had lost six and a half days to vehicle downtime over the previous twelve months.
Multiply those together and the typical van-dependent business is losing somewhere near £7,600 a year in work it never got to do. Construction businesses in the survey reported higher daily losses, around £1,464.
You will not see any of that on a repair bill. It shows up as a delivery that arrives late or not at all, a customer ringing to ask where it is, a driver paid for a day he spent waiting, and occasionally a hire van to cover the gap.
Then there's the bit that arrives weeks later. A missed delivery becomes a three star review instead of a five. It becomes a slightly cooler conversation when the contract comes up for renewal. Your customer doesn't know or care that a battery failed. They know their delivery didn't turn up.
Why two vans hurts more than twenty
A large fleet absorbs downtime. There is a spare vehicle in the yard and the work gets moved onto it.
Most of the businesses we look after run between two and twenty vehicles, and at that size there is no spare. Lose one van out of three and you have lost a third of your capacity for the day. The bigger operator has a problem. You have lost the day.
That is the part of the maths that gets missed when a small business compares a quote for planned maintenance against the price of waiting for something to break. The comparison isn't the service cost against the repair cost. It's the service cost against the repair cost plus the day.
What actually takes vans off the road
Between us Keith and I have been doing this for over fifty years, most of it on vehicles that earn their keep. The unplanned failures fall into a short and boringly predictable list.
Batteries. The single most common reason a van doesn't start on a Monday. Short delivery runs never fully recharge a battery, and a van doing twelve drops around Dudley all day is doing a lot of stop-starting and very little charging. Most van batteries give three to five years, and almost all of them give warning signs first. Slow cranking on a cold morning is the vehicle telling you it has about six weeks left. We covered the warning signs in more detail in 7 signs your car battery is dying.
Tyres. Vans run heavy, often with the weight badly distributed, and commercial tyres wear faster on the inside edge where nobody looks. Kerbing at a delivery point does the rest. A blowout at seventy on the M5 with a loaded van behind you is a different event to a blowout in a Corsa.
DPFs and EGR valves. Diesel vans doing short urban runs never get hot enough for the filter to regenerate properly. The van goes into limp mode, usually at the worst possible moment, and by then you're looking at a forced regen at best and a replacement filter at worst. This is the most preventable expensive failure we see, and it's preventable with a regular longer run at motorway speed rather than anything we do with a spanner.
Clutches. High-mileage vans, heavy loads, stop-start town driving. A clutch rarely goes without a fortnight of warning through a high biting point or a slipping feel under load. Drivers frequently don't mention it until it fails completely.
Timing belts and wet belts. If you're running Ford, Vauxhall, Peugeot or Citroen commercials, some of those engines have the belt running inside the engine in oil. When it degrades it doesn't snap, it sheds rubber into the sump and blocks the oil pickup, which kills the engine. We wrote about which engines have one and how to spot it in Wet Belts Explained. If you run a mixed van fleet, it's worth ten minutes of your time.
Look down that list and there's a pattern. Almost none of these are sudden. They're all things that give notice, to somebody who is looking.
The scheduling mistake almost every small fleet makes
Here's the one that surprises people.
If you bought or leased three vans at the same time, they were all first registered within a few weeks of each other. Which means their MOTs all fall due within a few weeks of each other, every single year, forever. Same for their service intervals if they're covering similar mileage.
So once a year you get a fortnight where three vehicles need testing, and if two of them need work to pass, you're short two vans in the same week. It isn't bad luck. It's arithmetic that was baked in on the day you bought them.
The fix is unglamorous and it works. Pull the MOT and service dates forward on some vehicles so the fleet's dates are spread evenly across the calendar. You lose a few weeks of MOT validity once, and after that you're never short two vehicles in the same week again.
What we do when a fleet comes to us
We had a ten-van fleet come across to us this month, a local business running Vauxhall Vivaros out of an industrial unit a few minutes from our workshop. Those vans run deliveries. A vehicle stuck in a yard is a delivery that lands late or doesn't land at all, which is a customer chasing, a review that could have been better, and a conversation at renewal time that starts on the back foot. The van is the service, as far as their customers can see.
The first thing we did wasn't a service. It was a look at all ten.
Every vehicle goes through the same check: condition, service history, tyre dates and tread, brakes, battery health, MOT due date, and anything a driver has been quietly living with. That takes a morning and we don't charge for it, because until we've seen the vehicles neither of us knows what the fleet actually needs.
One of the ten had an emissions warning light on. It was still driving and still doing its rounds, so it had been left. What it was actually doing was burning more fuel than it needed to, every day, on every drop. We diagnosed it and fixed it as part of the onboarding. Nobody had been ignoring it out of carelessness. It simply wasn't stopping the van, so it never got to the top of anyone's list, and there was no point in the month where someone whose job it was to look at the vehicles looked at the vehicles.
That's the honest case for a planned schedule. Not the dramatic failure. The quiet one that costs you fuel for months and eventually becomes a limp mode on a delivery run.
Out of that comes a schedule. Services and MOTs spread across the year, planned around when the vans aren't earning rather than when it suits us, with a reminder before each one is due.
The honest limits of all this
Planned maintenance does not stop everything.
It doesn't stop a driver kerbing an alloy, someone reversing into a bollard, a stone through a windscreen or a van being broken into. It doesn't stop a component failing early, because occasionally they do. Anyone selling you a maintenance plan on the promise that you will never have an unplanned day off the road is overselling it.
What it does is move most of your downtime from unplanned to planned. An unplanned day costs you the jobs. A planned morning while the driver is on holiday costs you nothing.
Five things worth doing this week, with or without us
1. Put every MOT and service date in one shared calendar. Not a wall planner in an office nobody sits in. Something that reminds you a month out.
2. Check the dates on your tyres, not just the tread. The four digit code on the sidewall gives you the week and year of manufacture. Van tyres over six years old are worth watching regardless of tread depth.
3. Look at whether your MOT dates are bunched. If two or more fall in the same fortnight, spread them at the next test.
4. Get a pre-MOT check before the test, not after the fail. A failure costs you the vehicle for days rather than hours, because the parts have to come in while the van sits. Keith's MOT checklist is a good place to start.
5. Tell your drivers you want to hear about noises early. Most drivers stay quiet because they assume they'll get grief for it. A driver who reports a slipping clutch in week one saves you the recovery truck in week three.
If you run vans around the Black Country
We're two mechanics in a workshop on Turner Street in Dudley. Keith has forty years on the tools and is a qualified MOT assessor. I handle diagnostics and the jobs other garages send away. When you ring, you get one of us, and after a few months we know which van you mean before you finish the sentence.
We cover Dudley, Halesowen, Stourbridge, Kingswinford, Brierley Hill, Rowley Regis, Sedgley and Tipton. Routine work can happen at your yard while the drivers are out, and anything needing a ramp comes to us.
The first look at your fleet is free and there's nothing to sign. Tell us what you're running and we'll give you an honest view of what it needs, including the parts that can wait.
Call or WhatsApp Elliot or Keith on 07453 957641, or read more about how we handle fleet maintenance for small local businesses.