Trucking Advice on Maintenance Costs

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Maintenance for our purposes includes everything pertaining to lubrication and scheduled maintenance only. This chapter does not include break downs or repairs because of failure. One maintenance item is oil and oil change components such as filters. Let's figure our cost on this item. For example, you change oil every 10,000 miles and your unit holds 18 gallons of oil. The oil filter your unit uses costs $12.00 plus a luberifiner that costs $15.00. You can buy oil at $4.50 per gallon. This gives you a cost of $27.00 for filters plus $81.00 for the oil. The total cost for an oil change is $108.00. Take your scheduled oil change miles of 10,000 and divide it into the $108.00 figure giving you a .00108 per mile cost for oil. Do not forget to add more for oil if your unit uses any more oil between oil changes. If your unit uses one gallon between oil changes, this would be added to your original figure of $108.00 bringing you to a figure of $112.50. Now divide this increased cost by the 10,000 miles. The figure now changes to .00112 per mile. Other issues are trickier. Let's look at grease for example. A case of grease lasts you a year. You need to treat this just like fuel mileage. Take the beginning mileage and subtract it from the ending mileage. Then divide the cost of a case of grease by that mileage. Here's an example, you purchased a case of grease when your speedometer read 110,000 miles. You didn't purchase another case of grease until your speedometer had a reading of 205,000 miles on it. By subtracting the first reading of 110,000 miles from the second reading of 205,000 miles, you arrive at 95,000 miles for which the case of grease lasted. The case of grease cost you $14.00. Divide $14.00 by 95,000 and you arrive at a cost of.0001473 per mile for grease. Do this with every issue involved in maintenance. I have listed items on the work sheet that will help you complete this subject. You might have other items which you feel need to be added to this list, so there are some empty areas for your own convenience. One of these formulas will work for every item on the list.