How to find unused trucks and vehicles in your fleet

To find unused vehicles in your fleet, look at when each vehicle last moved, not at where it stands now. Take the GPS history from its tracker, find the last moment it actually drove, and list every vehicle that has stood still for longer than a window you choose; a week is a common start. Before you call a vehicle unused, check that its tracker is still reporting. A tracker that went silent and a truck that is parked look exactly the same on a map.

Why idle vehicles matter

Lease, insurance and depreciation run whether a truck drives or not. A tractor that has stood at the depot for three weeks is capacity you pay for and do not use. The reasons are usually ordinary: it is in the workshop, waiting for a driver, kept as a spare or only needed in the busy season. Once you know which vehicles stand still and why, you can move one to another site, hand back a lease, sell it or fix whatever keeps it off the road.

Parked or offline? Tell them apart first

Sort every tracked vehicle into one of four groups:

• Tracker reporting, moved recently: in use.
• Tracker reporting, not moved for the whole window: not used.
• Tracker silent for too long: usage unknown. Fix the tracker before drawing any conclusion.
• Tracked for less than the window: too early to tell.

Keep the third group separate. Calling a vehicle unused because its tracker lost power leads to the wrong decision about the vehicle, and leaves a broken tracker unrepaired.

What counts as “moved”

GPS is never perfectly still. A parked vehicle’s position wanders by a few metres, and some trackers report a small speed while standing. Count a vehicle as moved only when it went clearly faster than that noise, or ended up clearly further away than a position fix wanders. Ignore positions at latitude 0, longitude 0: they mean the tracker had no fix, not that the truck moved.

A simple routine

• Pick a window per vehicle type, and leave out types that stand still by design.
• Review the list once a week.
• Write the reason next to the vehicle, with dates: “in the workshop until Friday” answers the question before anyone asks it.
• Decide: reassign, sell, return or repair.

How Konvoi does it

Konvoi has a Not used rule in its fleet-health alerts. It looks at every vehicle with a linked GPS tracker that is still reporting, and flags the ones that have not moved for 7 days. You can set that window between 1 and 90 days in Settings → Fleet Health, and switch the rule off for vehicle types; containers and “other” are left out by default. A vehicle counts as moved when it went 10 km/h or faster, or was more than 500 m from where it stands now, within the last 90 days of telemetry. A vehicle never seen moving is only flagged once it has been tracked for the whole window.

A tracker that has been silent past the GPS-offline threshold, 24 hours by default, shows up as GPS tracker offline instead, so a vehicle is never both. Both appear in the fleet’s issues list and in the daily fleet-health e-mail, where each issue is announced once. The dashboard’s Fleet now view shows the same vehicles as “Not driven”, and a dated note on a vehicle, such as “In the workshop”, shows as a marker in the fleet list.