Delivery Fleet Repair on a Route Schedule

We sort delivery fleet damage into three buckets at intake. Bucket one is anything that keeps the van off the road: door that will not close or latch, damaged mirror or glass, lighting, a bent step, a lift gate that will not lift, a bumper hanging into a tire. Those get done immediately and usually in one to three working days. Bucket two is damage that will get worse or will cause a lease return charge. Bucket three is cosmetic damage that does not matter yet.

That sorting saves real money, because a fleet that repairs bucket three items on demand is spending body shop hours on marks the leasing company will assess at $200. We give you the bucket assignment in writing and let you decide, but the default recommendation is fix one, schedule two and defer three to a batch at lease return time.

Sliding doors, overwhelmingly. Hundreds of cycles a day destroys rollers, tracks and lower hinges, and once the door starts binding the driver forces it, which bends the track and cracks the lower rear corner of the door frame. Replacing rollers without straightening the track just puts new parts into a bent assembly, and it fails again in a month. We straighten the track and check the frame squareness before fitting hardware.

After that: rear roll up doors on box units that get slammed and that go out of track, rear bumpers and corners from dock and pole contact, mirrors, and lift gates that have been overloaded or driven with the platform partly stowed. Interior floor and wall liner wear from load handling. And graphics that have been abraded, sun faded or partly torn off.

If you have one spare and eleven routes, the only workable model is a rolling single unit repair with a hard return date. We will build that: one van in, one van out, on a fixed weekly cadence, with parts staged in advance for the next unit in the queue. It is a slower way to work through a backlog and it never costs you a route.

For fleets with no spare at all, the practical approach is short duration work only, scheduled on your lightest day, with anything requiring paint and cure time batched separately. We will also quote overtime and weekend work explicitly for units that genuinely cannot be down on a weekday, priced as a delta so you can decide whether it pencils.

Rates are $210 per hour for body and paint, $260 for mechanical and electrical, $285 for diagnostics with the first hour credited against an authorized repair, and $95 for detail. Materials run $55 per paint hour and $5 per body hour with $45 flat hazmat, and 7.75 percent tax applies to parts and materials only. Parts carry 100 percent markup at $100 or less and 35 percent above $100.

High volume accounts benefit from a standing approval threshold. Tell us a dollar figure under which we should just do the work on a known unit and invoice it, and we will operate that way rather than calling for a $340 mirror. Above that figure we quote and wait. That single arrangement removes most of the delay from a delivery fleet relationship.

Body and paint labor is posted at $210 per hour. Mechanical and electrical is $260 per hour. Diagnostics run $285 per hour with a one hour minimum that is credited back against an authorized repair. Ranges below reflect jobs we have actually completed.