Fleets waiting up to five months to get cars repaired under warranty
Fleets are experiencing major delays with warranty work with wait times for repairs allegedly reaching up to five months.
Mark Sinclair, downtime management specialist at leasing firm Ogilvie Fleet, said five-month wait times for warranty work on company cars were “not unrealistic… particularly with the premium manufacturers”.
He said the business had resorted to independently handling repairs to keep fleets’ vehicles on the road by paying for work and seeking out franchised garages with availability.
“We’re almost taking things into our own hands. We sometimes just need to spend the money and bypass the warranty on these vehicles to make sure that people are getting the product that they lease from us. Do we want to put a customer in a position where they’re waiting weeks for a repair just to utilise a warranty, or do we put our hands in our pockets?
“We, as the leasing company, now have to do most of the work in terms of finding a garage that’ll take the vehicle a lot sooner than that. We don’t have any problem sending a vehicle to Nottingham, for example, if it’s based up here in Stirling [Ogilvie’s HQ] if we can’t get it into a [local] garage.”
Sinclair claimed Ogilvie’s efforts had seen its average vehicle off-road times for 2024-2025 fall by 17% or 3.6 days from 21.4 days to 17.8. He said its longest downtime case last year was 225 days, down from 412, while the percentage of incidents over 30 days old fell from 19.6% to 16.6%.
A long-term parts shortage is the main cause of delays, as the pandemic and international conflicts have repeatedly hindered production. Technician shortages exacerbate the problem, especially those qualified to work on electric vehicles, as newer technologies and software are prone to teething trouble. The Institute of the Motor Industry said 35% of technicians were qualified to work on EVs at the end of 2025 and suggested demand could exceed supply by more than 43,000 technicians by 2035.
Martin Nørgaard Høgh, CEO of Tjekvik, which specialises in dealership automation services, said OEM warranty policies also had an impact.
“In many cases, it actually conflicts with the brand requirements to be proactive toward warranty work,” he said, “most OEMs have a requirement in their in their dealer contract saying you cannot approach a customer to do a warranty case, because they don’t want to just pay money out for warranty work. It has to be the customer who makes the claim and then you can bill reactively, even though that’s a worse customer experience.”
Lead times have reportedly fallen for vehicles out of warranty. In May, fleet service, maintenance and repair (SMR) specialist Epyx reported that overall fleet downtime had fallen to its lowest level since before the pandemic. It said the average length of time vehicles spent off-the-road for maintenance or repair work was 1.46 days in January, 1.47 in February and 1.53 in March. That was down from 1.54 days in January 2020 and the peaks of 1.83 days in May 2023 and November 2025 and 1.91 days in December 2025.
The company stipulated that its data did not include warranty work, lead times for which were the preserve of OEMs.
In June, Epyx said fleet use of franchise dealers for SMR work had fallen to “a new low”. According to its data, 54% of jobs went to franchised dealers in January 2020; that had fallen to 41% by late 2025 and stayed that way in the first quarter of this year, when the figures were sourced. Average hourly franchise dealer rates recorded by Epyx increased by 32% from an average of £70 in January 2020 to £93 in March 2026, while non-franchise workshops rose by 27% from £43 in January 2020 to £55 in February 2026. Where it does not contravene warranties, fleets are said to have increasingly turned to green or recycled parts, because they are more readily available.
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