Motor Pool
A shared set of vehicles reserved as needed rather than assigned to a department or individual. The usual answer to a fleet with too many lightly used units.
A motor pool replaces assigned vehicles with shared ones booked when required. A department that needed four vehicles for occasional trips needs much fewer pooled ones, because the peaks rarely coincide.
It is the standard remedy for low utilization, and it is a political problem much more than a logistical one. An assigned vehicle is convenience, status and certainty; a pooled one is a reservation that might not be there. Pools succeed where booking is genuinely easy and a vehicle is genuinely available, and fail where the first inconvenience sends people back to demanding their own.
The savings are real but arrive indirectly. Removing a vehicle removes its replacement charge, its maintenance, its insurance and the space it occupied, none of which appear as a single line labeled savings. Making the case usually means costing the vehicles that were eliminated rather than the pool that replaced them.
Pools also produce the utilization data that justifies the next decision, since a booking system records demand rather than merely mileage. That is often the more durable benefit.
