I agree the fleet issue isn’t just about high repair bills, it’s about how risk and incentives are structured. The FMC contracts were negotiated without meaningful DSP protections, and redeployment standards are far more aggressive than retirement standards, which drives costs that DSPs can’t reasonably absorb on older vehicles.
Compounding that issue is how wear and tear is evaluated. PAVE is being used as the primary standard, and from what many of us have observed, the evaluation process appears to rely heavily on automated or algorithm-driven assessments rather than consistent human judgment. That creates variability and often flags issues that don’t align with normal commercial wear and tear for high-mileage delivery vehicles.
When an imprecise, automated evaluation process is combined with near like-new redeployment requirements, the result is inflated repair bills that don’t reflect the vehicle’s true condition or remaining useful life.