Something broke. Now it is dispatch’s problem.
A truck down on a shoulder, at a customer’s gate or halfway through a jobsite is a hole in your day before it is a mechanical fault. We triage it on the phone, roll to where it sits, and most of the time it leaves under its own power. Napa, Solano and the East Bay, any hour on the clock.
- Answered at any hour, all seven days
- No hourly minimum
- What the job runs, before we start
- Light duty through heavy duty
Two halves of fleet work, and this is the loud one
Fleet service splits cleanly down the middle. One half is planned: oil, filters, intervals, a walkaround on a calendar, all of it happening on a lot at an hour you chose. The other half is this page. A driver calls in, a unit is stopped, and nothing about the next four hours was on anybody’s schedule. The work is mechanical. The pressure is not.
We cover the scheduled half too. If what you are reading for is intervals and records rather than a stopped vehicle, mobile fleet maintenance is the page that covers it, and the two work best run together: fleets that maintain on a rhythm call this number less often, and when they do call, we already know the unit.
What we roll toPickups and work trucks, cargo and service vans, box trucks, straight trucks, tractors and trailers, plus the equipment that shares a yard with them.
The numberYou hear what the job runs while the truck is still parked, and short repairs bill short because there is no minimum hiding underneath.
Before you need itSend us your unit list now and a breakdown call starts with make, model and history instead of twenty questions.
The phone call does half the repair
Most of what decides a breakdown happens before anybody arrives. A driver saying the truck died at a light and will not crank is a different call from one saying it lost power gradually over ten miles, and a different one again from steam and a temperature gauge climbing. Those three descriptions point at three different sets of parts, and the right ones end up on the truck before it leaves American Canyon.
So expect questions. What was it doing. What did it sound like. What is on the dash. Whether it cranks, catches and dies, or does nothing at all. Whether the load is on it and whether the load is perishable. None of that is stalling. It is the difference between one trip and two, and on a stopped fleet unit the second trip is the expensive part.
Triage also decides the honest answer about scope. Some faults are a roadside repair, some are a get it to your yard repair, and a small number are a this one needs a shop with a lift repair. Knowing which one you have inside the first ten minutes lets dispatch start re covering the route instead of waiting to find out.
What usually stops a working unit
Breakdowns are less varied than they feel. A handful of failures account for most of the calls we take, and each has its own page for anyone who already knows what they are looking at.
No start diagnostics
Dead at a gate is the single most common fleet call. Battery, cables, starter or something further upstream, and guessing wrong costs a second visit.
Overheating diagnostics
A climbing gauge on a grade with a load behind it. Coolant, water pump, fan or thermostat, and the wrong call cooks the engine.
Air brake repair
Leaks, slack adjusters and chambers on anything heavy enough to run air. A truck that will not build pressure is going nowhere legally or otherwise.
Hydraulic hose replacement
A burst line on a lift gate, dump body or boom. Hose made up on site beats waiting on a part number from a counter.
Flat tire service
Steer, drive or trailer position, including the ones nobody carries a spare for. Roadside when it has to be, yard when there is time.
Fleet diagnostics
When the dash is lit and nobody can say why. Codes pulled and read on the spot rather than interpreted over a phone by somebody who cannot see the truck.
Fix it here, or move it: how that call gets made
There is no rule that a mobile repair is always right. There is a set of conditions, and they get checked in order while we are looking at the unit.
- Is the spot safe to workA narrow shoulder on I-80 at dusk is not a place to pull a starter. If it is not safe, the unit moves first and the repair follows somewhere sane.
- Does the fault need the vehicle in the airPlenty of work happens on jack stands beside a truck. Some of it genuinely needs a lift, and pretending otherwise turns a four hour job into a ten hour one.
- Are the parts gettable todayCommon failure items ride on the truck. Anything model specific comes down to whether a local counter has it before close, and you hear that answer straight.
- What does the route needSometimes the right move is a quick repair that gets the load delivered and a proper fix at your yard that night. Say so and we will work to that.
- Then a price, then the workOnce the plan is settled you get what it will cost before the truck leaves or before the first bolt moves, whichever comes first.
What having an account actually buys you
There is no contract and no retainer here, so being a fleet account is not a product you purchase. It is a file. Your units, their plates, their engines, what we have already touched and what we flagged last time. The value of that file shows up exactly once: at two in the morning when a driver calls and cannot tell us what the truck is.
Where we can genuinely give priority is on sequencing. When two calls land in the same hour and both are legitimate, the unit belonging to a fleet we service regularly, whose history we already hold and whose route we understand, is the one we can start on faster. Nobody gets abandoned for it. That was the whole reason Patrick started this business, after watching too many people sit on a shoulder because their job was small or far away.
See the gallery for what the work looks like, or get your units on file while nothing is broken.
What dispatchers ask when a unit goes down
Anything not covered here gets a straight answer on the phone. The line is picked up around the clock.
How fast can you get to a stopped unit?
It depends on where the unit is and what is already in front of it, and anyone who quotes you a flat number without asking either question is guessing. What we will do is tell you honestly when we can be there when you call, rather than saying soon and leaving you to wonder. From American Canyon, the Napa and Vallejo corridor is a short run, and Fairfield, Benicia, Suisun and the Highway 12 stretch are not much longer.
Do we have to be there with the truck?
Not necessarily. If the unit is at your yard or a secured site and we can get access to it, plenty of repairs happen with nobody standing there. On a public shoulder it is different, because the vehicle should not be left and there are safety reasons for a driver to stay with it. Tell us the situation when you call and we will say which applies.
Can you handle a mixed fleet, or only trucks?
Mixed is normal here. The same yard often holds half ton pickups, a couple of box trucks, something with air brakes, and a skid steer parked in the corner. We work across that range, and we would rather one caller handled the whole lot than have you keep three numbers for three weight classes.
What if the repair cannot be finished on site?
You get told that before anybody has run up hours discovering it. Then the options get laid out: move the unit to your yard and finish it there, do a temporary repair that gets the load where it needs to go, or arrange a tow to a shop with a lift. We do not tow, but we will tell you plainly that towing is the right answer when it is, rather than wasting your afternoon proving it.
How does billing work when you are called out at night?
The same way it works at noon. You hear a price before work starts, there is no hourly minimum, and a twenty minute repair is billed as a twenty minute repair. There is no separate structure for unsociable hours, because a fleet does not choose when it breaks and charging extra for that has always struck us as punishing the customer for bad luck.
Is this different from regular roadside assistance?
Overlapping but not the same. General roadside assistance covers anyone stuck on the road, including cars and personal vehicles. Fleet repair assumes a commercial unit with a job attached to it, a dispatcher waiting on an answer, and consequences downstream if the answer is slow. The wrenches are the same. The way the call gets handled is not.
One unit down should not cost the whole day.
Call with the location, the unit and what it was doing when it quit. You will get a real answer about what is likely wrong, when somebody can be there, and what it will cost before a wrench moves. The phone reaches a mechanic, not a script.
HoursMonday to Sunday, 24 hours
Based inAmerican Canyon, CA
Related pagesBreakdown assistance · After hours repair · Uptime management