EROAD Fleet Day moved to a two-day format for the first time this year and the extra time on the floor gave the vWork team a clearer read on where fleet owners' heads are at. The mood across both days was surprisingly positive. Owners are optimistic about demand and where their businesses are heading over the next year.
But one theme came up again and again: asset utilization. Fleet owners aren't just thinking about the return on the vehicles they've already invested in; they're thinking about the need to improve utilization because they can no longer count on simply hiring more drivers to grow.
The numbers back up what we heard on the floor. Transporting New Zealand's 2025 Road Transport Workforce Report, produced with Teletrac Navman, reports 35% of drivers are now 55 or older - with drivers over 65 already making up more than 10% of the industry workforce.
In the same year's National Road Freight Survey, 31% of businesses said they expect to lose up to a quarter of their drivers to retirement within five years, and 47% of respondents put that figure even higher. This isn't a New Zealand-only problem either: the International Road Transport Union projects 3.4 million drivers across 36 countries will retire by 2029.
Recent policy shifts have made the squeeze more immediate. Following a New Zealand Transport Agency audit, 440 commercial driving licenses were revoked in late 2025 over documentation issues. It left operators scrambling weeks before the busiest season of the year.
Even if they could find someone willing to take the wheel, the reality is training a replacement can take months, not weeks. It means every driver a fleet already has on the road becomes more valuable by the day.
This is exactly why utilization, not headcount, is becoming the metric that matters most. Fleets can't always add more drivers. They can, however, get significantly more out of the ones they have.
That's the problem vWork was built to solve. While we could talk at length about the wide range of ways we do this - three key things seemed to resonate in our EROAD Fleet Day conversations:
Removing manual paperwork from a driver's day frees up real time. One North Island trucking company used vWork over a four year period and reported they cut driver paperwork by seventy-five percent and invoicing prep time by 60%. That is time that went straight back into driving and delivering rather than admin.
Route optimization means dispatchers can plan tighter, more efficient runs and adjust on the fly when conditions change, so existing drivers complete more jobs without working longer hours. Delivering in Full and On Time (DIFOT) is a big factor in savings; the value of not having to redeliver is more than a trip saved. Many customers report a 20-25% improvement in productivity and fuel efficiency.
The ability for you to create tailored templates for client specific delivery requirements literally takes a load off your drivers. In-built alerts mean any driver can take on any delivery and follow the very specific instructions for compliance. Customer SLTs, health and safety and site specific instructions are all covered…with no coding needed.
None of this replaces the need for more drivers entering the industry. But while that pipeline rebuilds, the fleets that come out ahead will be the ones that made their current drivers as productive as possible.
What we have outlined above is just a taste of what vWork can do to assist you do more with the drivers and fleet you have. If the driver shortage is coming up in your conversations, our eBook, How to Survive the Global Driver Shortage, goes deeper into the practical steps fleet owners can take right now.
Or if you want to see what maximizing your existing fleet and drivers could look like for your business? Let us show you.