Fleet Duty Rating: the methodology
Fleet Duty Rating — named review format · awaiting data
Published · Last updated
The Fleet Duty Rating is this site's named review methodology: a published specification for scoring a vehicle on four operational measures — miles run, downtime days, cost per 1,000 miles, and faults by mileage band — designed for the one duty cycle nobody else measures: credit hire fleet operation. It exists because hire duty is the hardest test a mainstream car faces, and no published review format currently measures it. This page defines the method. It does not publish results. No Fleet Duty Rating has been calculated, and none will be published until the underlying fleet dataset is supplied. Until then, every review and durability record on this site stands on attributed public sources alone — DVSA MOT results, DVSA recall records, owner surveys and manufacturer documentation — and no fleet figure is ever estimated, modelled or inferred.
Status: awaiting data. No Fleet Duty Rating score has been calculated or published for any model. Publication requires the underlying operational dataset, its sample size, the period it covers and the calculation applied — none of which is available yet. Nothing on this site presents a fleet-derived score, and no review, durability record or award result should be read as one.
What is the Fleet Duty Rating?
A four-field operational scorecard, specified to be applied to every model in the review library once fleet data exists. Unlike road-test reviews, it is designed to measure what a car does over tens of thousands of hire miles: how much it works, how often it is off the road, what it costs to keep running, and what breaks at which mileage.
What does each field measure?
- Miles run
— total recorded fleet mileage across all examples of the model in service, with fleet-average miles per vehicle. Unit: miles. The exposure base for every other field: a rating built on 40,000 fleet miles says little; one built on two million says a great deal.
- Downtime days
— days a vehicle is unavailable for hire due to unscheduled maintenance or fault rectification, expressed per vehicle per year. Unit: days/vehicle/year. Scheduled servicing is excluded; the field measures unreliability, not maintenance.
- Cost per 1,000 miles
— maintenance and repair spend (parts and labour, excluding accident damage and scheduled servicing consumables priced identically across models) divided by miles run. Unit: £/1,000 miles.
- Faults by mileage band
— recorded faults grouped by odometer band (0–30,000 · 30,000–60,000 · 60,000–100,000 · 100,000+) and by system (engine, transmission, electrical, suspension/steering, brakes, body/interior). The field that shows how a model ages, and the backbone of the durability strand.
Where will the data come from?
The methodology is specified against the operational and maintenance records of a working UK credit hire fleet — workshop records, off-road logs and cost ledgers, compiled per model. That dataset has not been supplied to this site, so no field has been populated. When it is, each published figure will state the fleet sample size, the period and the mileage base it is drawn from, so every number is traceable; until then the four fields stay empty.
What public sources do reviews use?
Four classes of public source, always attributed inline: DVSA MOT test results, the DVSA vehicle recall database, published owner-survey data (e.g. the What Car? Reliability Survey), and manufacturer service schedules and technical bulletins. A review would carry a Fleet Duty Rating score panel only where the underlying fleet record supports it; no review currently carries one. A score is never derived from public sources alone, and public-source insight carries no review-rating markup.
Can a manufacturer influence a rating?
No. Ratings will be computed from operational records; there is no paid entry, no manufacturer sign-off, and no commercial relationship that alters a figure. The site's ownership and commercial model — including exactly how it does make money — are stated plainly on the about page.
Where the rating will appear
When the data exists, every model review will carry the four-field block and the Credit Hire Car of the Year will be judged on it. Today, reviews carry public-source analysis only, durability records borrow the faults-by-mileage-band structure but populate it from the public record, and no award has been made.