A van off the road costs its owner an average of around €700 a day.¹ For the fleet operators we're meeting this week at IAA Transportation 2026, that figure isn't abstract — it's the single largest hidden cost in their operation. Ford Pro's answer to it is data.
Two years ago at this show, the focus was on FORDLiive: a connected system linking vehicles, operators, Transit Centres and Liive Agents to shorten workshop repair times. Last year alone, FORDLiive delivered almost a million additional days of vehicle uptime for customers across Europe — the working time equivalent of nearly 4,000 extra staff.
FORDLiive solved the problem of making repairs faster. The next problem was needing fewer repairs in the first place — shifting the model from reactive intervention to continuous, predictive monitoring, tailored to how different fleets actually operate.
“A van off the road costs its owner an average of around €700 a day.”Usha Raghavachari, director of product development, Ford Pro Services
How is Ford Uptime Services Proactive by Design?
For smaller operators whose primary relationship with Ford Pro runs through a local dealership, that predictive layer is Dealer Uptime Services. A bakery or butcher isn't built around fleet administration — it's built around what they make and sell. Dealer Uptime Services puts vehicle monitoring in the hands of the dealership itself, which can flag and resolve issues before they interrupt a delivery run.
"It's made everything much faster and less complicated, meaning we can concentrate on what we do best without unnecessary downtime." — Ulrich Reichenbach, managing director, Metzgerei Reichenbach
For larger fleets — those with a direct commercial relationship with Ford Pro rather than a single dealership contact — we built an equivalent system: Ford Uptime Services.
Ford Uptime Services extends the same diagnostic architecture that underpins FORDLiive and Dealer Uptime Services, scaled for fleets running into the hundreds of vehicles. Having already proven its value with UK fleets of that size, we are proud to announce the launch of this service at IAA in Hannover for customers in Germany.
How Does Ford Uptime Services Actually Work?
Ford Pro vehicles stream thousands of telemetry signals daily — fault codes, sensor thresholds, component wear indicators. Ford Uptime Services uses those to run continuous, condition-based diagnostics across a customer’s fleet.
Our dedicated agents monitor these signals, converting raw data into a prioritised service queue before a vehicle actually reaches the point where something fails.
In practice, that means when a driver sees a warning light on the dashboard, Ford Pro experts have already identified the precise issue, assessed its urgency, and begun scheduling the repair. That all happens without the fleet manager needing to manage the process manually, or rely on their driver to flag up the issue.
That matters because fleet managers' time is a scarce resource. In our conversations with operators running large fleets, the same priorities come up repeatedly: driver training, the transition to electrification, and operational productivity. Every hour spent firefighting an unplanned breakdown is an hour not spent on those priorities.
Ford Pro’s infrastructure behind this is substantial: over 800 dedicated Transit Centres across Europe, supported by around 500 Mobile Service vans capable of completing more than 70 per cent of scheduled servicing on-site.
The system itself was developed using Ford Pro’s dedicated Human-Centred Design team and built and refined directly with UK trial customers. We’ve already saved them around 3,700 days of downtime, equating to €2.5 million in savings for those businesses.
“Ford Pro’s infrastructure behind this is substantial: over 800 dedicated Transit Centres across Europe, supported by around 500 Mobile Service vans.”Usha Raghavachari, director of product development, Ford Pro Service
A complementary function, Remote Diagnostics, converts the same telemetry into a prioritised daily or weekly alert digest. This gives fleet managers a fast, structured overview of what needs their attention and in what order, without requiring them to interpret raw vehicle data themselves.
What Difference Can Ford Uptime Services Make?
In the UK, where the service is already operational, leading London housing association L&Q used Ford Uptime Services to cut downtime by 60 per cent across their fleet of 600 vehicles. According to L&Q, that increase in uptime saved them roughly £17,000 (€19,800) a month.
Prism Medical operate more than 100 Ford vehicles distributing beds, hoists, and specialist care equipment to hospices and care homes. They reduced lost working days from 43 to just six per month after adopting Ford Uptime Services.
Beyond the Balance Sheet
The financial case is clear, but the operational shift is arguably more significant: fleet managers freed from constant maintenance firefighting can instead spend their time on the parts of the business that actually grow it — optimising productivity, training their drivers, driver development, planning fleet electrification. That's harder to quantify, but it's the change every fleet manager we've spoken with describes first.
Ford Pro commercial vehicles have long been built on reliability. Ford Uptime Services extends that same engineering discipline into software services — treating our customer fleets’ data with the same rigour as their vehicles, so that the vehicles keeping Europe's businesses running stay on the road doing exactly that.
Usha Raghavachari is director of product development for Ford Pro Service
1 February 2026 research by the Centre for Economics and Business Research surveying 1000 businesses in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK to understand the indirect costs of vehicle downtime. Commissioned by Burson and Ford Motor Company.
