Most fleet managers can quote the labour rate they pay their garage to the penny. Very few can quote the full cost of a van being off the road for a day. The first number is on an invoice. The second is buried in eight different places — which is exactly why VOR cost is the line item most fleets quietly underestimate.
The five buckets of VOR cost
A van off the road is not one cost — it is five, layered on top of each other. To build a model that holds up in a planning meeting, name each one.
- 1. Lost contribution
- The revenue the vehicle should have generated minus its variable cost. For a parcel route, this is drops × margin per drop. For a service van, it is jobs × margin per job.
- 2. Driver cost
- Most drivers are still paid for the day even when there is no van. If they can be redeployed, this falls; if they sit in the canteen, it doesn’t.
- 3. Replacement cost
- Hire vehicle day-rate, agency driver if applicable, fuel differential, plus the admin cost of arranging it.
- 4. Customer-cost
- Missed SLA penalties, refunds, churn risk on a contract that needed to be served on time. Hard to size but never zero on a B2B route.
- 5. Recovery and rework
- Recovery to the garage, second visits, parts that arrived wrong, diagnostic time when the first part didn’t fix it.
A worked model: 80-van last-mile fleet
Take an 80-van urban last-mile fleet running six days a week. Average van does 110 drops a day at a £2.10 contribution per drop — call it £231 of lost contribution per VOR-day. Driver on £140 fully-loaded; reasonable assumption is half can be redeployed, so call it £70. Hire van at £55 a day. Customer-cost we model at 10% of revenue for SLA-bound routes, so ~£23. Recovery and rework averaged across the fleet sits around £40 a VOR-day.
- Lost contribution
- £231
- Driver cost
- £70
- Replacement vehicle
- £55
- Customer-cost
- £23
- Recovery & rework
- £40
- Total per VOR-day
- £419
Most of that fleet’s internal reporting captures the £55 hire-van cost and stops. The other £364 is real, and it accrues to the P&L whether anyone counts it or not.
Where parts sourcing fits in
On a typical mechanical job — bearing, sensor, EGR, turbo, clutch — the actual wrenching time is usually a few hours. The clock that runs against the fleet is dominated by two waits: diagnostic-to-quote, and quote-to-parts-on-the-bench. In the data we see, parts sourcing is the bigger of the two on roughly two thirds of VOR events. It is also the one a fleet manager can actually compress.
A normal sourcing cycle for a non-trivial part — say, a turbo for a 2.0 TDI Transit — looks like: garage rings three local factors, two have to call back, one has a brand they don’t trust, eventually somebody finds it at a national distributor for next-day delivery. Two days lost. At £419/day, that’s £838 of cost the fleet manager will never see itemised.
A cross-reference platform compresses that to minutes. The OEM number resolves to every equivalent across every UK supplier currently holding stock, with delivery times. Same-day instead of two days saves, on this model, roughly £838 per event. Across the fleet, those events add up faster than any other operational lever.
How to build the model for your own fleet
- Take a representative van and compute lost contribution per day from your own revenue and variable-cost numbers.
- Decide a redeployment rate for drivers — be realistic, not aspirational.
- Pull twelve months of hire-van invoices and average the day rate.
- For SLA-bound routes, agree a customer-cost % with the commercial team. Even a low number is better than zero.
- Pull six months of VOR events from the garage. Split each into "diagnostic to quote" and "quote to parts on bench". Look at the second column. That is the biggest lever you have.