The True Cost of Oil Changes for Fleet Vehicles in 2024

Oil changes are often regarded as one of the cheapest and simplest kinds of vehicle maintenance you can perform – and must perform, given how critical clean oil is to the efficient operation of your engine. 

The trouble is, there’s a lot more to it than just pulling into a quick-lube outlet and swapping the oil. In fleet vehicles especially, there are many details to consider above and beyond the simple cost of oil and labor. What is the true cost of oil changes for your fleet? You might be surprised.

Trends in the Cost of Fleet Maintenance

Before getting into specific areas where costs matter, it’s important to talk about trends across the industry and across the country.

Unfortunately, as we all know, the massive disruptions of global trade and production caused by the coronavirus pandemic have still not fully resolved, and while some things are getting back to normal, others are not, and may never return to that old baseline. The “new normal” is, unfortunately, higher costs for everything from consumables to parts to labor.

There’s good and bad news on the horizon.

The good news:

• Labor rates seem to have peaked around January of 2023.
• Maintenance costs, in general, are leveling off, though there are still spikes and drops in local regions or industries.
• Better availability of newer vehicles allows for lower maintenance, at least for a while.

On the other hand, there’s plenty of bad news.

• The cost of oil, in particular, is going up.
• There’s likely to be an increase in need for skilled maintenance technicians, meaning labor won’t be dropping any time soon.
• Supply lines are still vulnerable to disruption and unforeseen fluctuations.

If your fleet is in a position where maintenance costs are stable, you’re one of the lucky ones. Analyzing the costs of oil changes across a fleet just goes to show how even one part of fleet maintenance can be very difficult to fully track.

The Cost of the Right Oil

Right away, one of the most obvious costs rears its head. An oil change is one thing, but what oil do you use?

First of all, many OEMs are increasingly recommending the use of synthetic oils over more traditional oil options. Synthetics last longer and work better, but are more expensive, and realistically will be changed at around the same time as traditional oils.

At the same time, using a better oil may be more expensive on the face of it, but can be better for the life and longevity of the motor. It’s important to understand not just the immediate costs, but the deferred costs as well. 

The Cost of Using the Wrong Oil

Relatedly, using the wrong oil has many hidden costs. The most obvious cost is just burning through the oil faster and requiring more frequent oil changes.

However, there are several other potential costs that can crop up.

• Oil of the wrong viscosity can cause problems if your vehicles are operating in very hot or very cold environments.
• The wrong oil can cause excess wear on engine parts, requiring more maintenance and potentially catastrophic failure down the road.
• Even a slightly incorrect oil can affect fuel efficiency and increase fuel costs, which can be a hidden impact you never even associate with your motor oil.

For something as commonplace as oil, it can be difficult to see the cascading effects it can have on the operation of a fleet vehicle, and operations across the whole of a fleet.

The Cost of Used Oil Disposal

Another cost that is often overlooked is the cost to dispose of used oil. Sure, maybe in the 60s it was commonplace to dump used oil in a hole in the ground, but these days, that’s firmly illegal. Properly disposing of used motor oil is a complex task.

If your fleet has in-house maintenance and your own service centers, you need to have a contract with a third party that can come in and empty your reservoirs to dispose of the oil properly. On the other hand, if your fleet contracts with third-party maintenance and service centers, you’ll have an oil disposal service charge with every transaction, and that can add up quickly over time.

The Cost of the Wrong Oil Filters

Oil filters are important to fleet operations, but they’re also an area where fleet managers may make a bad decision without ever realizing it.

Are all filters more or less the same, and is the cheapest option “good enough” to do the job? Not really. The cheapest filters can be clogged much more quickly than higher-quality oil filters. In the event of a catastrophic failure, the damage can be much more severe than the cost of a better filter would have been.

What about the inverse? Are the most expensive filters the best choice? Often, no. The most expensive filters on the market tend to have gimmicks or markups based solely on brand name and aren’t actually better than options in the upper end of the middle range.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to identify which filters are the best for any given fleet. Evaluating reviews, discussing the topic with other fleet managers, and tracking performance of various filters on vehicles throughout your fleet are all ways you can identify which filters are the best.

Don’t forget to re-evaluate your choice of oil filter from time to time. Parts shortages and corporate juggling can cause the same product to be made with different tolerances or different materials over time, which can jeopardize quality.

The Cost of Scheduling and Time Expenditure

One of the most commonly overlooked costs is the cost of time. Every hour that your fleet vehicles are not on the road is an hour of potentially lost revenue, a lost load, lost capacity, and in extreme cases, even lost contracts, particularly for LTL and flexible shipments.

It’s one thing to schedule proactive maintenance, plan for your vehicles to be out of service for an hour or two or half a day, and ensure that you have enough backup coverage to keep all of your services in operation. It’s something quite different if you need to scout local areas where your trucks happen to be, to find service providers, contact them and see if they have the capacity to perform fleet vehicle service, if they have the right oil and filters on hand, and if they have the availability to work with you right away.

The Cost of Labor

As we mentioned up top, the cost of labor for all forms of fleet maintenance is a tricky issue. Actual labor rates have more or less peaked across the industry and the nation, but they can still fluctuate in local areas. Additionally, there’s a good chance that they will continue to climb, just not as fast as they were before.

All of this is due to a widespread labor shortage. There’s currently a deficit of nearly 50,000 service technicians across the industry, and that’s estimated to increase over the next several years. It’s not just in the USA either; similar deficits are expected in Canada and elsewhere.

The Cost of Modern Vehicle Complexity

Another source of costs is the increasing complexity of modern vehicles. We’re not talking just about things like electric trucks or self-driving vehicles; we also mean just the complexity of motors, computer and sensor systems, and engines.

It requires an increasing amount of skill and knowledge to be able to perform maintenance, let alone perform inspections and recognize signs of damage. It’s not always clear whether or not a set of trained technicians is experienced enough to work on newer vehicles, and the “fake it until you make it” approach can lead to immense damage down the line.

The Cost of Administration and Overhead

Another often-overlooked cost of something as simple as oil changes is the administrative burden it puts on the fleet manager. You need to know the maintenance status of every vehicle in your fleet and track it appropriately in your fleet management platform of choice. You need to understand the maintenance schedules for each vehicle, how they can differ based on age and usage, and how different vehicles have different requirements for maintenance and parts.

On top of that, you need to have a comprehensive picture of where all of your fleet vehicles are at any given time. Scheduling deliveries such that the vehicle is in the area of a service center so they can get work done on schedule and without delays or disruptions is often difficult, and the larger and more distributed your fleet is, the worse it becomes. 

A good fleet management app can do a lot of this scheduling automatically and can notify you when to map routes and deliveries to optimize for maintenance, but it requires good and up to date data to make full use of these features.

The Cost of Delayed Service

Driving when an oil change is overdue can be dangerous, and that goes double for fleet vehicles hauling heavy loads. Engine oil is a critical part of the smooth and effective operation of a truck. When oil is old, it’s more likely to be damaging and eroding parts of the engine, causing heat problems, and can even leak and cause more issues that way. There are many, many different ways that old oil can cause a catastrophic failure.

While sometimes it’s impossible to avoid going overdue for an oil change, the more proactive you can be with it, the better off your vehicles will be in the long run.

The Cost of Missed Inspections

A huge part of oil changes – and one that is all too often ignored – is that they aren’t just an oil change. They’re an opportunity for a skilled and knowledgeable service technician to perform a full-circle inspection of the vehicle. This is one of your best chances to look for potential problems that might crop up in the near future and deal with issues before they cause a truck to end up stranded on the side of the highway.

When you’re working to find a service center that can perform your fleet oil changes, look for one that can perform robust inspections along the way. Those inspections need to happen one way or another, so if you delay them here, you need another opportunity (and the commensurate costs of time and scheduling) to have it performed.

The Cost of Non-Volume Contracts

One of the few benefits you get as a fleet manager when it comes to services like oil changes is the opportunity to leverage volume contracts and discounted pricing. When you sign a maintenance contract with a service brand, you can negotiate for lower rates or discounts on services rendered because you’re not just bringing in one vehicle; you’re bringing in however much of your fleet operates in the area. 

If you’re just picking and choosing a service center nearby when maintenance is due, you lose out on these kinds of benefits and the consistency they can provide.

The Cost of Missing Telematics

Good fleet management involves telematics harvested from the vehicles themselves. This data can help you in a number of ways, including with forecasting potential issues above and beyond simple maintenance.

As a simple example, consider the oil filter issue above. When you maintain records about the fuel efficiency, oil type, operations, and other data on the vehicle, you can estimate the efficacy of the fuel filter and test different filters to find the one that works best. Without telematics, you’re just guessing.

The Cost of Finding the Right Shops

Another part of the administrative burden of oil changes throughout a fleet is simply locating the shops you can rely on to perform high-quality service. You need to identify local shops, check them out and see what their reviews say about them, talk to them and see if they can provide the volume, frequency, and level of services you need, negotiate contracts, and more. It’s a lot of work.

Fortunately, this is one area where we can help. At Epika, we have a national network of service centers in both major metropolitan areas and in smaller towns throughout the country. No matter where your trucks are headed, one of our service centers is bound to be nearby. That means that rather than going through the hassle of finding a network of maintenance providers you can trust, you can just do it once with us. Just click here to locate your nearest stores and get started with great maintenance today.

• Category: Blog