Enterprise Flex-E-Rent, Enterprise’s U.K. commercial vehicle rental division, has invested more than £1 million in new equipment to reduce commercial vehicle downtime, helping boost fleet capacity and keeping customers on the road longer.

The new investment in state of-the-art diagnostic and workshop equipment includes specialist tooling and direct system links to original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners, as well as roller brake testers and ancillary equipment maintenance such as tail-lift weight testing.

It boosts Enterprise Flex-E-Rent’s in-house workshop capability by 30% across all of its 28 depots throughout the U.K.

This new investment will shift costly vehicle off-road time (VOR) away from unplanned, reactive maintenance events towards scheduled maintenance, which involves regular servicing or compliance checks such as ministry of transports (MOTs). It will help to increase capacity across Enterprise’s 65,000 vans, trucks and specialist commercial vehicles.

It has been estimated that downtime costs U.K. fleet operators well over £2 billion per year, and that fleet vehicles which are part of a maintenance program are proven to experience 20% fewer unplanned downtime days.

Enterprise uses a range of metrics for VOR, including tracking the percentage of fleet off the road and key-to-key time.