Motive targets fleet repair costs with AI maintenance

There are two records every fleet that runs its own shop has: what was reported by the truck on the road, and what gets written up by the technician in the bay. An evergreen challenge is that these records don’t always match. Motive built its newest product on the premise that closing that gap is the cheapest way left to hold down fleet repair costs.

The company recently announced Motive Maintenance to tackle this. It’s an AI-powered system that pulls fault codes, inspection defects, work orders and repair spend into the same platform that already holds its customers’ telematics and fuel card data. Rising carrier costs are behind the timing. Carriers’ average marginal cost reached $2.

336 per mile in 2025, the highest in the history of the report, according to the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2026 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking. Maintenance and repair climbed 8. 6% year over year in that dataset, an additional 2 cents per mile, and the category is up 45% since 2019, according to Fleet Maintenance.

Only tolls, up 13. 2%, rose faster last year. Non-fuel costs hit $1. 854 per mile, breaking the $1. 78 record the Motive report cites from 2024. Fuel is the number carriers argue about, and maintenance is the one compounding underneath it. That pressure originates in the parts market. Parts costs rose 3.

7% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2025 while labor slipped 0. 4%, according to the most recent Decisiv/TMC Parts & Labor Service Benchmark Report. Parts are up 23. 8% since early 2020 in the same dataset.

The Motive report puts the average annual repair and maintenance bill for a heavy-duty truck in the United States at $16,192, a number built on ATRI’s 2024 figures. That baseline is already stale by a year of 8. 6% growth.

Motive’s own research, conducted with FreightWaves Research in the second quarter of 2026, drilled down on where fleets are feeling the squeeze.

Rising maintenance and repair costs ranked as the leading operational challenge for 80% of respondents, with driver recruitment and retention at 60% and fuel cost management and fraud prevention at 50% among the other major concerns. Only 13% described their fleet technology systems as well-integrated and sharing data automatically across 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 The money disappears in the gap between planned work and emergency work. Reactive repairs run three to nine times the cost of planned preventive maintenance, according to the Decisiv/TMC service benchmark data. FleetNet America breakdown data was also cited in the report.

Kolluri gave an example of the top end of that range using a 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.

Those inputs come from that FleetNet America and TMC roadside maintenance data: 8. 7 days of unplanned downtime per vehicle per year, at $448 to $760 per day in lost productivity. From Cryptic Fault Code to Work Order Before this release, a critical fault code produced an alert in one system, and the shop work got scheduled in another.

“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 translation of fault codes matters just as much as the routing. A fault code arrives as a string only a technician can read, and Motive’s diagnostics convert it into plain language with a severity ranking attached.

Now a description, instead of a code, determines whether a truck comes in today or later. Kolluri drew a distinction on the Motive Card, the company’s fleet fuel card. It does not pay the repair bill. “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,” he said. The Prediction Problem Is an Integration Problem Two-thirds of respondents, 67%, said they struggle to predict which vehicles are at risk of failure or unplanned downtime. That’s