Service triggered by the van, not the whiteboard

The problem

A fleet manager waits for a driver complaint, a dashboard light, or a sticker on the windscreen. They call the garage, haggle over a date, then someone digs through an inbox to find the last invoice for the right brake pads. The van sits idle for three extra days because a sensor knew about the wear last Tuesday but nobody read it.

What AI makes possible now

The telematics stream is piped into a small orchestration layer that watches fuel trim, brake wear counters, DTCs, and calendar proximity to known service intervals. When a rule fires, a lookup matches the vehicle, the fault, and the nearest approved garage with bay availability from a synced calendar. It drafts a booking request to the garage, generates a purchase order for the likely part from the last supplier, and posts a tentative three-day slot into the fleet calendar. You get a Slack card with two buttons: Confirm booking or Snooze for 48 hours. You click, and the system finalises it.

How it works

1. Telematics API pushes aggregated usage counters and active fault codes hourly into a staging table.
2. A threshold engine checks odometer, engine hours, DTCs, and time since last service against the vehicle's plan, ignoring transient faults that clear within a cycle.
3. When a rule matches, it calls the garage's CalDAV link or API to fetch the next available slots and ranks them by travel distance from the vehicle's overnight GPS fix.
4. A brief is assembled: vehicle reg, fault description, suggested part number from the last two purchase orders, and preferred slot; it lands as a confirmable card in your team's messaging channel.

The first thirty days

In the first 30 days you get one vehicle type connected, one telematics data source, one garage calendar, and the confirmable booking card. It covers brake pad wear and one common DTC that maps to a known part, ignoring anything complex. The card gives you the last supplier price and lets you approve or defer. That keeps the garage loop closed while we watch for false triggers.

How it earns

Each avoided breakdown saves a recovery callout, a day of lost revenue per van, the admin scramble, and the premium on an emergency garage slot. A fleet paying £400 in avoidable downtime per van per month covers the subscription after the first six vans run quietly on the system.

Why now

Mid-range telematics platforms now expose a standardised API, and independent garages are adopting CalDAV scheduling tools just to keep up with online booking. The two endpoints are finally ready to talk.

First customers

A 15-to-80-vehicle mixed fleet running light commercial vehicles on a two-shift pattern, where unplanned downtime directly cancels a day's chargeable work.

The hard part

The garage's live bay calendar can drift because a mechanic goes off sick and nobody updates the system; the booking lands and you still get a phone call. We manage that with a confirmation timeout and a fallback SMS to the service desk.

Build this with us

We connect your telematics and your garage's diary, wire the rule engine to your model of van, and put a simple approve-or-snooze card where your dispatchers already work. If your fleet runs on ring binders and phone calls, this turns the vans themselves into the requester. Get in touch and we'll map a single vehicle thread end to end.