DON’T WORRY if you’ve never heard the phrase ‘truck-as-a-service’. Neither had we before we started working on this article. The ‘as-a-service’ part – also known as servitization – is increasingly applied to plenty of industries and products beyond HGVs, and essentially involves paying for usage instead of ownership.
Rather than coughing up for, in this instance, a lump of metal with wheels, you might buy a vehicle on a per-kilometre basis, or as a kind of all-inclusive package deal, where the only thing the operator supplies is the fuel and the driver.
The manufacturer owns the vehicle and runs the basket of services that comes with it. There’s more pressure on the OEM to deliver decent standards because the customer is paying for a service, not a product, and the alleged value is greater efficiency and a lack of risk. Think of it as the antithesis of the old-school outright purchase model, and you’re about there.
