The Most Expensive Part of a Breakdown Is Not Knowing What’s Wrong

Your motortruck isn’t conscionable a portion of equipment. It’s your office. Your income. Your schedule. Your leverage.

And the infinitesimal a DPF airy oregon motor responsibility shows up connected the dash, each of that tin grind to a halt.

That world is precisely wherefore this caller occurrence of The Long Haul deed location for truthful galore owner-operators. I sat down with Tyler Robertson, founder of Diesel Laptops, to speech astir thing astir tiny carriers don’t deliberation astir until it’s excessively late: diagnostics, downtime, and who really controls the repair process erstwhile your motortruck breaks.

What came retired of that speech was simple, but uncomfortable:

Waiting connected shops to archer you what’s incorrect with your motortruck is 1 of the astir costly habits successful trucking.

Tyler didn’t travel from Silicon Valley oregon a firm R&D lab. He came from a motortruck dealership.

After getting kicked retired of assemblage for atrocious grades, helium went to enactment for his family’s motortruck dealership and learned each broadside of the concern — parts, service, sales, accounting. That’s wherever the ideas started forming. Day aft day, helium watched trucks travel successful breached and watched drivers wait. And wait. And pay.

Later, portion moving different occupation and buried nether the aforesaid benignant of indebtedness astir radical transportation — recognition cards, loans, vehicles — Tyler started a broadside hustle. He recovered a diagnostic bundle retired of Canada that could work every machine connected a commercialized truck, thing that wasn’t communal astatine the time. OEM bundle was locked down, fragmented, and expensive.

He bundled that bundle with a laptop and a cable, listed it connected eBay, and sold his archetypal portion successful 24 hours.

That was the commencement of Diesel Laptops.

One of the biggest takeaways from the speech was this: Most breakdown costs aren’t caused by parts. They’re caused by uncertainty.

When a motortruck goes into derate oregon throws emissions codes, the archetypal question isn’t “what portion bash I need?” It’s “how superior is this?”

Without that answer, everything stops. Drivers sit. Loads get rescheduled. Shops commencement guessing. Tyler calls it the “parts cannon” — throwing parts astatine a occupation until thing works.

And that gets costly fast.

According to Tyler, North America spends tens of billions of dollars each twelvemonth fixing commercialized trucks. Off-highway instrumentality — construction, agriculture, generators — multiplies that fig adjacent further. Yet, dissimilar automotive, determination is inactive nary existent right-to-repair model for commercialized trucks.

That means accusation stays locked down OEM walls, and tiny carriers wage the price.