Headlight Restoration for Fleets – Part 1 of 2: The Pros and Cons of Restoring Headlights on Commercial Vehicles

An extremely profitable but often overlooked market for your headlight restoration service is commercial vehicles. Replacement headlights on modern trucks and other commercial vehicles are often very expensive and for a variety of reasons often do not last as long as automobile headlights. As a result, fleet maintenance supervisors are often willing to pay a premium price for headlight restoration.

Another benefit to offering headlight restoration to fleets is that dozens of commercial vehicles are commonly parked in the same lot at the same time, many in need of your service. Repeat business is always a bonus and the likelihood of repeat business with commercial vehicles is far better than with personal vehicles.

Some things that contribute to the accelerated deterioration of headlight lenses on commercial vehicles include: increased miles driven each year; additional driving in severe weather conditions; often not garaged; and harsh cleaning methods. Heavy duty chemical detergents are regularly used for manual and automatic truck/bus washing and are particularly harmful to polycarbonate headlights.

While there are many pros to offering headlight restoration to fleets, keep in mind that if the OEM headlight coating has a shorter than normal life due to the abuses noted above, an aftermarket coating, including Infinity 4.1, will have a shorter than normal life as well. Please take this into consideration when drafting a warranty for your fleet customers.

View the next in this series as we continue this topic by exploring chemical soaps and realistic warranties for commercial vehicle headlight restoration.