The benchmark numbers
ATRI's 2024 update put repair and maintenance at $0.202 per mile, up 3.1 percent from 2023, while driver wages rose to $0.779 per mile and the industry's marginal cost reached $2.270 per mile. The 2025 update showed the average truck cost at $2.260 per mile in 2024. Maintenance is one of the few line items a fleet controls directly: it is not a fuel price or a rate sheet, it is a schedule and a record.
The oilfield wears it faster
Highway PM intervals understate what an oilfield truck endures. Dust packs air filters and contaminates oil, heat cooks belts and hoses, caliche roads hammer steering, suspension, and tires, and heavy water and sand loads stress brakes and drivelines. Brake and tire violations dominate CVSA out-of-service findings, and both are the kind of defect a PM program catches before the inspection wand comes out, not after.
The schedule lives in the record
A PM program is only as real as the work orders, oil analysis results, and inspection reports behind it. When completion of PM is tied into dispatch and the driver vehicle inspection report, a truck cannot quietly run past its interval on a long job. The same record that keeps the truck legal is the evidence an auditor or an underwriter asks for, so the schedule is both a maintenance tool and a commercial one.
PM discipline connects to roadside inspection readiness, tire cost, and aftertreatment care. If maintenance intervals are judged by feel and repairs are approved by phone, an operations audit will show which trucks are running past their schedule right now.