A packer down at 6am is a nightmare nobody wants.
Refuse trucks regen more, idle more and fail harder than anything on the road. Tensor Planet reads your telematics and tells you which packer will strand a route.
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What actually goes wrong in a refuse operation
The curb is the most expensive bay
A repair done at the roadside costs up to four times the same job in your own bay, and breakdowns already run over $5,000 per truck a year before you count the missed route.
Stop-and-go duty interrupts regens
A hundred stops a shift means regens that start and never finish. Soot climbs for weeks, then the derate lands mid-route. Exhaust is 14.9% of repair spend, second only to the engine.
Your spare ratio is expensive insurance
Most fleets park 10% to 15% of their trucks as spares, capital sitting in a yard against the possibility of a breakdown. The fewer surprises you have, the fewer spares you need to carry.
The fleet is older than you would like
Side-load and front-load packers average 11 years, rear-loads 15, roll-offs 16. Older aftertreatment fails more often and costs more, which makes early warning worth more, not less.
What we watch on a refuse truck
Aftertreatment and engine systems, on the data your telematics already sends. Nothing goes on the truck.
- Soot load and DPF inlet pressure across interrupted regen cycles
- DEF dosing faults building toward a derate
- EGR valve and cooler degradation under heavy idle
- NOx sensor drift ahead of an emissions fault
- Engine coolant behavior on hot, heavy duty cycles
- Cranking voltage decline that ends in a no-start at pull-out
- ...and many other systems
A Maine refuse fleet, one year in
fewer exhaust-related repairs
in realized savings
service disruptions avoided each week
Source: Troiano Waste Services, Maine
Read the case studyRunning a municipal contract?
Tensor Planet is available through the RTA contract number 102924-RTA, a Sourcewell cooperative contract. Buying through it means pre-approved pricing and no separate RFP process.
One week, your own data, no buy commitment.
We read your telematics and six months of work orders, then hand back the vehicles at risk and what they would cost you. Your team does nothing while it runs.
The questions on your mind.
How is Tensor Planet different from telematics systems?
Telematics systems show vehicle location, safety events, and fault codes. Tensor Planet works with your telematics data to predict failures weeks before they happen. We tell you what’s likely to fail, why, and what action to take.
How long does implementation take?
Most fleets can start seeing first alerts within 1 to 3 weeks after data access, with predictions improving as the model tunes to fleet patterns.
We already do preventive maintenance. Why do we need this?
Fixed-interval PMs treat every vehicle the same. We use each vehicle’s sensor data and repair history to catch issues between PMs and flag repairs only when needed.