Comparing vehicles by cost

When you group the Fleet Cost Cockpit by the Vehicle dimension, you get a ranked, side-by-side comparison of what every vehicle costs. This article shows how to use that ranking to find your most and least expensive vehicles.

Switch to the Vehicle dimension

Set the dimension to Vehicle and choose your period. The cockpit produces one bucket per vehicle, labelled by its licence plate, and returns them sorted by total cost with the most expensive vehicle first. Each bucket also carries its own category split (fuel, maintenance, damage, insurance, leasing, fines and receipts), so you can see not just how much a vehicle costs but why.

What each vehicle total includes

A vehicle's total sums every cost source that can be attributed to it:

• Fuel from its refuelling records.
• Maintenance and service costs.
• Damage repair line items from its damage cases.
• Its share of insurance premiums (a shared policy is split evenly across the covered vehicles).
• Leasing/financing charged per active month.
• Receipts (Belege) booked against the vehicle.

Note: Fines are attributed to a cost center rather than to an individual vehicle, so they are not part of a per-vehicle total. Compare vehicles on the costs that are genuinely vehicle-specific, and use the Cost center dimension when you need to include fines.

Make the comparison fair

A raw total favours cheap answers — an old, barely-used vehicle will always look cheaper than a new, heavily-used one. Keep these points in mind:

• Age in the period. A vehicle added mid-year has fewer months of leasing and fuel than one present all year. Use equal, whole-month periods.
• Utilisation. A high total may simply reflect high mileage. Pair the comparison with cost per kilometre to normalise for distance driven.
• One-off events. A single large damage repair can push a vehicle to the top of the list for one period without indicating an ongoing problem — check its monthly trend.

From ranking to root cause

Once the ranking highlights an outlier, drill into that vehicle's breakdown to see its category split and monthly trend. This tells you whether the cost is structural (high leasing or fuel every month) or a one-time spike (a repair or an annual premium).

Tip: Export the Vehicle-dimension view to CSV to build your own comparison — for example dividing each vehicle's total by its recorded mileage in a spreadsheet, or flagging vehicles whose maintenance share is unusually high.

Comparing pools instead

If you manage vehicles in pools, switch to the Pool dimension for the same ranked comparison at pool level. Because the cockpit inherits each cost's pool from its vehicle, pool totals aggregate all the vehicles assigned to that pool.

Who can compare

Comparing vehicles requires the fleetcost:view permission, generally held by the FleetManager role. Exporting the comparison additionally requires fleetcost:export.

Related

• Total cost of ownership per vehicle
• Calculating cost per kilometre
• Filtering the cost cockpit by dimension and period
• Exporting cost data to CSV