Spare Parts Inventory and Warranty Claims

A vehicle waiting on a part earns nothing. On a shared fleet, every day a scooter sits in your shop for a $9 brake cable is a day of lost rides, and because Levy Fleets runs on revenue share, lost rides are lost income for both you and Levy. Parts management is not a storeroom chore. It is one of the highest-leverage uptime levers you control, and most new operators underinvest in it until a preventable outage costs them a weekend of revenue.

This lesson covers the three things that keep a maintenance operation fast: which scooter spare parts to keep on hand, how to set reorder points so you never run dry or overstock, and how to run fleet warranty claims cleanly. Levy stocks the common wear parts in the US and files manufacturer warranty claims (for example OKAI's 90-day defect coverage) on your behalf, which changes the math on how deep you need to stock.

Why parts availability is an uptime decision

Start with the money. A vehicle only earns when it is on the street and rentable. Time spent in your repair queue is amortization you already paid for and are not earning back, plus the technician labor to fix it. So the real cost of a missing part is not the part. It is the rides the vehicle misses while it waits, multiplied by every day of the wait.

That reframes the exercise. The goal of a parts program is to compress mean time to repair, the hours between a vehicle going down and coming back rentable. A part on the shelf turns a repair into a same-day job. A part you have to order turns it into a multi-day or multi-week outage while the vehicle bleeds revenue. Deep stock on the parts that break most often is almost always cheaper than the downtime it prevents.

Which scooter spare parts to keep on hand

Not every part deserves shelf space. Stock by how often a part fails and how much downtime it causes when you are out of it, not by what is cheapest to buy in bulk. A useful frame is three tiers: fast-movers you stock deep, medium-movers you keep a working buffer of, and high-value critical parts you hold a small, deliberate reserve of.

Levy keeps US stock of the common OKAI and Segway wear parts, and you order them through Levy rather than direct from the manufacturer, so they ship in days instead of the weeks it takes to order from overseas. The named stocked items are tires and tubes, brake cables and pads, display panels, batteries, fenders, and throttle assemblies. That list maps almost exactly onto the parts that fail most on a shared fleet.

Tier 1: fast-movers, stock deep

These are the consumables that wear out on a predictable curve under shared-use abuse. You will replace them constantly, so run out and your queue backs up immediately.

• Tires and tubes. The single most common repair on any scooter fleet. Curbs, glass, and potholes puncture constantly. If your vehicles run tubeless or self-sealing tires you will pull fewer, but you will still pull plenty.
• Brake pads and brake cables. Safety-critical and high-wear. A soft or dead brake is an immediate un-rentable condition, so you never want to be short here.
• Throttle assemblies. High-touch, exposed, and a common failure point. A dead throttle is a dead vehicle.

Tier 2: medium-movers, keep a working buffer

These fail less often but still on a regular cadence. Hold enough to cover your typical week between reorders.

• Display panels. Cracked or dead displays from tip-overs and weather.
• Fenders. Cosmetic and functional damage from drops and collisions.
• Levers, grips, kickstands, and cabling. Smaller wear items that add up. Keep a modest bin of each.

Tier 3: high-value and critical, small deliberate reserve

Expensive or slow-to-fail parts where you hold a thin reserve rather than deep stock, because tying up capital in a shelf full of controllers is its own waste.

• Batteries. High value, and pack health degrades over the fleet's life. Levy's Battery Swap tooling tracks pack state-of-health, so you can see degradation coming and replace on data rather than on surprise failure. Hold a small reserve sized to your swap cadence.
• Controllers and IoT modules. Expensive and less frequent. A handful of spares lets you get a high-value vehicle back on the road while you sort a warranty claim or a repair.

The exact mix depends on the hardware you bought. A fleet of one scooter model has a simple, deep, standardized parts list. A mixed fleet of scooters, e-bikes, and mopeds needs parts for each. This is one more reason to standardize on a small number of vehicle models, a point we make in the fleet scooter buyer's guide: common parts across a standardized fleet get vehicles fixed in minutes instead of scrapped, and shrink the number of SKUs you have to carry.

Stocking depth by vehicle type

Setting reorder points so you never run dry

Keeping parts on hand is only half the job. The other half is reordering before you run out, without burying cash in a shelf you never touch. The tool is a reorder point: the stock level that triggers your next order. Simple, but you have to set the number honestly.

The reorder point has two inputs. The first is lead-time demand: how many of a part you will use during the days it takes a replacement order to arrive. The second is safety stock: a small buffer for the weeks you break more than usual. Add them together and that is your trigger.

Here is the payoff of Levy's US parts stock: shorter lead time means smaller lead-time demand, a lower reorder point, and less capital frozen on your shelf. When a part arrives in days rather than weeks, you can hold less of it and still never run dry, which is working capital you get to spend on more vehicles instead of a bigger storeroom.

Track parts against work orders

Stock you cannot see is stock you will mismanage. Levy's Work Orders and Maintenance tools give you task management, technician dispatch, parts tracking, and vendor invoicing in one place, so a repair, the parts it consumed, and the technician who did it are all recorded against the vehicle. That record is what feeds the usage rates you need to set reorder points in the first place.

Two habits make the data trustworthy. First, log every part consumed on every work order, even the cheap ones, because an undercounted tire usage rate produces an underset reorder point and a stockout. Second, use vehicle health tracking and telemetry to catch issues before a rider reports them: battery state-of-health, connectivity, and status all surface in the operator dashboard, so a degrading pack becomes a scheduled swap instead of a dead vehicle on the street. For how vehicles move through service and back to rentable, see the fleet management help center, which documents vehicle lifecycle, maintenance mode, and telemetry.

One important boundary: telemetry flags mechanical and connectivity health, but Levy Vision handles parking, helmet, and sidewalk compliance, not vehicle damage inspection. Physical damage and part wear are still assessed by your technicians during service, so build a quick visual check into your maintenance workflow.

The warranty claim workflow

Warranty is where Levy saves you the most administrative pain, because Levy files the claim with the manufacturer on your behalf rather than leaving you to chase an overseas supplier. The headline coverage to know is OKAI's: 90 days from delivery, covering manufacturing defects. Other manufacturers Levy stocks carry their own terms, but the workflow is the same.

First, get clear on what a warranty actually covers, because filing claims that will be denied just wastes your time.

When you do have a genuine defect, run this workflow:

The practical takeaway: track your delivery dates. Warranty windows run from delivery, so a defect that surfaces at day 85 is claimable and one at day 95 is not. Knowing each vehicle's delivery date, which lives on the vehicle record, tells you instantly whether a failure is still in coverage.

Put the whole cycle on a weekly rhythm rather than a scramble: log every repair and part in Work Orders, batch a restock when fast-movers hit their reorder points, order stocked parts through Levy from US inventory, screen every failure for defect versus wear, file genuine defects through Levy, and revisit your stocking levels quarterly as the fleet grows. Do this and a broken vehicle becomes a same-day fix instead of a multi-week hole in your revenue.

Frequently asked questions

Start with the right hardware

The cleanest parts operation begins before your first ride, with hardware whose parts Levy stocks and models you can standardize on. Because Levy runs on $0 upfront and revenue share (a $250 per month platform minimum, no software licenses), your capital goes to vehicles and parts. Ready to build a fleet that stays on the street? Book a demo and we will help you spec hardware, stocking, and warranty coverage for your market.