Which cars in your fleet are actually profitable

Utilisation isn’t the same as profitability

It’s tempting to judge a vehicle by how often it’s out on rent. A car that’s constantly booked feels like a winner. But utilisation only tells you demand — it says nothing about cost. A popular economy sedan with cheap maintenance can easily out-earn a flashier vehicle that rents just as often but eats money in repairs, tyres and downtime.

The number that actually matters is simple in concept: revenue that vehicle generated, minus everything it cost to keep on the road. Most operators have the revenue half in a spreadsheet somewhere. The cost half is usually scattered — a maintenance invoice here, a fine there, a set of tyres nobody logged against a specific car.

Build the calculation once, per vehicle

The formula doesn’t need to be sophisticated to be useful:

• Revenue: total rental income attributed to that specific vehicle over the period.
• Minus maintenance: parts, labour, scheduled servicing.
• Minus fines and tolls: anything charged against that vehicle that wasn’t recovered from a customer.
• Minus other direct expenses: anything else tied specifically to that car — a tyre replacement, a windscreen repair, recovery costs.

What’s left is the number that actually tells you whether a vehicle is pulling its weight. Do this for every car and sort the list — the bottom of that list is usually where the surprises are.

What to do once you see the list

A vehicle at the bottom isn’t automatically a sell candidate — a brand-new car still paying off its acquisition cost will naturally look worse in year one. But a car that’s been in the fleet for years and is still near the bottom of the list, every period, is telling you something. Either its maintenance cost is structurally too high for what it earns, or it’s sitting idle more than the utilisation numbers suggest.

The operators who do this well don’t do it once as a one-off audit — they check it every month or quarter, because a vehicle’s position on that list changes as parts age and as demand for that vehicle class shifts.

Why this usually doesn’t happen by default

The reason most fleets don’t track this isn’t a lack of interest — it’s that the revenue and the cost data usually live in different places, updated by different people, on different schedules. By the time someone reconciles them by hand, the numbers are already a month or two stale, and the exercise gets skipped next quarter.

This is exactly the gap Lanevo’s fleet profitability view is built to close — revenue and recorded costs for every vehicle, calculated the same way, always current, without a manual reconciliation step.