The Bastard Handed In His Notice
- Peter Adams
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Ocker Joe goes to Auckland and evaluates Auto IntelliDents
When someone who’s actually run a fleet for two decades goes to look at an accident management system, you get a different kind of evaluation. This is mine.
What You’re Getting When You Read This
Look, I’ll be straight with you. When Tyler asked me to fly across the Tasman to check out some accident management system for the fleet he bought off me, my first reaction was: why can’t you just hire a decent fleet manager and be done with it?
But Tyler is smart enough to know what he doesn’t know. And after watching me deal with the insurance paperwork, the repair arguments, and the mystery bills for twelve years, he figured a second opinion from someone who’d lived through it might be worth a couple of plane tickets. I’ll give him credit for that.
What I Knew Going In
I ran a construction fleet for twenty-odd years. At peak we had thirty-two vehicles — utes, tippers, a couple of riggers, and a few company cars for the blokes who reckoned they’d earned them. And let me tell you, tradies are not exactly gentle with a vehicle.
The pattern never changed: vehicle gets pranged, bloke fills out a form — if you’re lucky — insurer gets involved, repairer quotes something that looks like it was written during a boom, and six weeks later you’ve got a bill you can’t quite argue with and a repaired ute that somehow still pulls left.
Nobody’s really watching the money. Nobody’s building the picture across the whole fleet. And the moment you ask for data, you get a shrug.
But here’s the story that explains why Tyler sent me to New Zealand specifically.
A few years back, Tyler inherited a project manager with the business — experienced bloke, knew the sites, knew the trades. He also knew exactly what he wanted in his salary package. A Mercedes ute. Top spec. The kind of vehicle that turns up on a construction site and makes everyone else feel slightly inadequate. Tyler agreed. He probably shouldn’t have.
The problem was Tyler barely saw the thing. It spent most of its time wherever this bloke spent his time, which apparently wasn’t always the job site. What Tyler did see — occasionally — was a claim. And every single claim told the same story: not his fault. Always the other guy. Always some phantom third party who’d made an executive decision to drive into a parked Mercedes ute.
No documentation. No photos. No inspection record. Nothing that told you what the vehicle looked like before the alleged incident and what it looked like after. Just a claim form with a signature and a version of events that couldn’t be verified. Then the lease came to the end of it's term.
The project manager handed in his notice — timing that, with hindsight, was not a coincidence. And shortly afterward, the bill arrived from the lease company. Excess kilometres, excess damage, wear and tear charges that bore no relationship to any wear or tear you’d expect from a vehicle driven by a responsible adult. The kind of bill that makes you want to sit down quietly and reconsider your life choices.
It would have been cheaper to write it off. And that’s why I’ve been dispatched to New Zealand.
Tyler wasn’t going to let that happen again. He needed a system that put eyes on the fleet that he’d never had — condition records, inspection logs, a paper trail that meant the next project manager who fancied a company vehicle as a personal perk was going to be working a lot harder to get away with it. So when Tyler said this Peter Adams bloke in Auckland had a system that gave you all of that in one place, I was more than interested.
Meeting Peter
Peter Adams isn’t what I expected. I expected a salesman. I got someone who’d been in motor claims management for thirty-five years — which means he knew exactly where the money was leaking before I’d finished telling him about the Mercedes. That’s either very good research or very good pattern recognition. Probably both.
The system is called Fractional Accident Management — FAM™ — and the pitch is simple enough: you don’t need a full-time accident manager on the payroll if you’ve got the right system doing the heavy lifting. It manages the claims, the comms, the repair process, and the data. For a fleet like Tyler’s — forty-odd vehicles across Sydney — that means a proper process without the overhead of building one from scratch.
What caught my attention was the IntelliDents app. Peter walked me through the monthly vehicle inspection regime — drivers complete their own condition checks through the app, everything is logged and time-stamped, and suddenly you’ve got a before-and-after record that actually holds up when someone tries to pin old damage on your vehicle. I’ve had that argument. More than once. And I’ve lost it, because I had nothing.
With the IntelliDents app, Tyler would have had something. He’d have had a condition record on that Mercedes from the day it was handed over. Every month, updated. Every claim, crosschecked against a baseline that couldn’t be argued with. The project manager’s version of events would have run into a wall of documentation on day one.
The AI-powered damage assessment is clever — not science fiction, just genuinely useful. You get a consistent read on damage that doesn’t depend on whoever happens to be standing in the yard that morning. And the full suite of modules covers the claim from first notification through to repair sign-off. It’s not a bolt-on — it’s built as an end-to-end workflow.
For a fleet operator who’s tired of chasing loose threads, that matters.
I expected a salesman. I got someone who’d been in claims for thirty-five years.
Over to Carlingford
The other part of the brief was to have a look at Carlingford Prestige Collision Repairs. Auto IntelliDents has a working relationship with them on the Sydney side — which matters if you’re running a fleet out of New South Wales and you want to know the repair end of the solution is actually sorted.
Meeting Dan Smith there was the part I was looking forward to. You can tell a lot about a repairer by how they talk about the work. Dan talks about it the right way. Straight, no theatre, focused on getting the vehicle right and getting it back on the road. That’s what a fleet operator needs. Not a great story — a good result.
The integration between what IntelliDents manages and what Carlingford Prestige delivers is the piece that makes the whole solution credible. A system that can assess the damage, manage the claim, and hand it to a repairer who actually knows what they’re doing closes a loop that most fleet operators never get to close. The two sides fit together. That’s not always the case when you’re dealing with different businesses in different cities.
You can tell a lot about a repairer by how they talk about the work. Dan Smith talks about it the right way.
What I Told Tyler
It stacks up. The inspection regime alone is worth it — not because accidents don’t happen, but because when they do, you want to be standing on solid ground when the conversation starts. If Tyler had this running when the Mercedes was handed over, that lease-end bill would have been a very different document.
The FAM™ model means you’re not paying for a full-time resource to manage something that happens intermittently. You’re paying for a structured process that runs in the background and kicks in properly when it needs to. And having Carlingford Prestige as the repair relationship in Sydney means the back end of the process is as sorted as the front.
Tyler’s the one who has to sign off on it. But he asked me to have a look and give him a straight answer.
That’s it.
If you’re running a fleet in Australia or New Zealand and you’re tired of getting to the end of a lease — or a claim — and wondering where the money went, talk to Peter Adams at Auto IntelliDents.
This piece uses fictional characters Joe & Tyler to illustrate real fleet management challenges. The Merc damage and cost to repair was real. All products, services, and capabilities referenced — including FAM™, the IntelliDents app, and Carlingford Prestige Collision Repairs — are genuine and operate as represented.
Auto IntelliDents | intellidents.online | Fractional Accident Management™
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