The second line, mid-morning
Your writer is on the phone with a fleet manager. The second line rings. It rolls. That caller has four other shops in his phone and a truck that isn't moving.
AI front desk · Diesel & heavy-duty only
The front desk that never goes home.
DieselDesk AI answers the calls your shop misses — nights, weekends, and while your writer is under a truck. It takes the unit number and the complaint, books the job into your schedule, and texts your team before the driver hangs up.
- Answers on the first ring, 24/7/365
- Speaks heavy-duty, not generic
- Live in days — you keep your number
Driver
"My truck's down — won't start. Are you guys open?"
DieselDesk AI
"Not till Monday, but I can get this handled tonight. Where's the truck sitting, and does it crank at all?"
Driver
"I'm at the truck stop on 99 south of Fresno. It cranks, just won't fire. Unit 487, Cascadia."
DieselDesk AI
"That one needs a tow, not a drive-in. Somebody's calling you back tonight to get it hooked, and I've got you first in Monday morning."
Job captured — Unit 487
No-start, cranks · Freightliner Cascadia · truck stop on Hwy 99 · not drivable, needs a tow · on-call texted 9:44 PM · Mon 7:00 AM held
Illustration of a captured call. Hear the real thing →
What the research says about service phones
42%
of automotive service calls are never answered by a person
Invoca, 2026 benchmarks — 70M+ calls analysed
57%
of heavy-duty shops report they are understaffed
Fullbay, 2025–26 State of Heavy-Duty Repair
30–50%
of service call volume lands outside 8am–6pm
Numa, auto service call benchmarks
The problem
Nobody misses calls on purpose. They miss them because the bay is full.
You are not short on demand. You are short on hands. Every shop we talk to loses the same three calls, in the same three moments — and the driver on the other end has a truck down and a load waiting.
Lunch, and the parts run
Between 11:30 and 1:00 the counter is empty. So is the front desk when your writer is chasing a part across town.
Friday 6pm through Monday 7am
Breakdowns don't keep business hours. Between a third and half of service call volume lands outside 8-to-6, and most of it hits a machine.
And the calls you do answer leak too
Invoca's 2026 analysis found that 64% of automotive businesses never ask for the appointment on a call that was answered. A booked job is not the same as an answered phone. DieselDesk AI is built to close the call, not just take it.
How it works
Three steps. You keep your number, your calendar and your customers.
Point your overflow at us
Forward busy, no-answer and after-hours calls from the line you already publish. Start with nights and weekends, or go 24/7 from day one. Nothing about your number changes.
We build your shop's agent
We load your services, hours, bay capacity, labour rate, fleet accounts and the questions your writers actually ask. This is done for you, not configured by you.
Jobs land in your schedule
Confirmed appointments drop into your calendar and get texted to your team with the unit, the complaint and the callback number. Roadside and true emergencies route straight to a human.
Proof, not promises
Don't take our word for it. Call it.
Ring the demo line and talk to it like a driver would — describe a no-start, ask for a PM, push back on the schedule. It will take your unit number and book you in.
Call the demo lineAvailable 24/7. It is the same agent your shop would get.
You can talk to the AI right now, straight from this page — no download, no signup, no salesperson. Look for the "Start the demo call" button in the bottom-right corner of your screen and click it. Describe a breakdown the way a driver would and see how it handles you.
Works best with your microphone on and sound up.
What it does
One employee. The whole front-office loop.
Not a phone tree and not a chatbot with a number. Everything below is included in the single package — there is no upgrade that unlocks the useful parts.
Answers every call, 24/7
First ring, every ring — nights, weekends, holidays, and the second line while your writer is already talking. No hold music, no voicemail.
Speaks the work
Unit number, make and model, mileage, engine family, fault codes, dash lights, DOT deadline, PM interval, fleet account. The details your writers actually need on the ticket.
Books into your schedule
Real appointments on real availability — not "someone will call you back." Written to your calendar and texted to your team with everything captured.
Escalates the real emergencies
A driver on the shoulder is not a Tuesday appointment. Roadside, tow-ins and hot fleet accounts are flagged and pushed to a human immediately, on your rules.
Confirms, reminds, follows up
Booking confirmation, appointment reminders, and a post-service follow-up that asks for the Google review. Included — not held back for a higher tier.
Shows you every call
One dashboard: who called, what they wanted, what was captured, what was booked, what was escalated. Recordings and transcripts on every call.
The arithmetic
Priced against a hire, not against software.
The honest way to judge DieselDesk AI is not against another app. It is against what it would cost you to put a person on that phone — because that is the job it is doing.
| What answers your phone | Cost per month | When it's available | Books the job? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heavy-duty service advisor | $6,391 | 40 hrs/week | Yes |
| Full-time receptionist (California, fully loaded) | $5,448 | 40 hrs/week | Yes |
| Part-time receptionist (California, fully loaded) | $2,724 | 20 hrs/week | Yes |
| Human answering service at real volume | $400 – $1,725 | Varies | Takes a message |
| DieselDesk AI | $899 | 24/7/365 | Yes — into your calendar |
Wage figures derived from BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics inflated to 2026 and the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation benefits loading of 1.43×; heavy-duty service advisor from ZipRecruiter, July 2026; answering-service range from published AnswerForce, AnswerConnect and Ruby rates at comparable volume. Full source list on our sources page.
16.5%
of what a full-time front-desk hire costs in California — and it doesn't call in sick, take lunch, or leave at five.
6 hours
of shop labour at $149 an hour. That is the whole monthly bill, in bay time you already sell.
2.5 ROs
of gross profit a month covers it — about one recovered job every other week, on an $800 repair order at 45%.
Run your own numbers
Use your shop's figures, not ours.
This calculator works on gross profit, not revenue — because revenue you don't keep isn't a return. Every input is yours. If it doesn't clear, it says so.
Recovered-revenue calculatorGross profit basis
Net gross profit after paying for DieselDesk
$2,341
What the defaults mean
300 calls a month at 2.5 minutes is the working volume assumption for a five-to-eight-bay independent. It is an estimate, not a benchmark — no published call-volume study exists for an independent repair shop at any duty class, and we would rather tell you that than dress an assumption up as a fact.
Set “real customer calls” net of spam — Hiya's analysis of 46.75 billion calls found 28% of unknown-number inbound is spam or fraud, and none of that was ever going to book. The $800 average repair order comes from Fullbay's heavy-duty framework, and 45% is a blended gross profit across labour and parts. Change both to your real numbers — the whole point of this calculator is that your figures beat ours.
- Counts only jobs you would otherwise never have seen
- Ignores reminders, follow-ups and review requests entirely
- Subtracts the full $899 before it shows you a number
Why diesel only
A generic AI receptionist will book your truck like a haircut.
There are dozens of AI answering services. They are built for dentists, salons and law firms, and they ask the questions a dentist's office asks. None of them know what a regen is.
- It knows the intake. Unit number before name. Fault code before email. Whether the truck is drivable before anything else.
- It knows the work. PM services, DOT inspections, aftertreatment, air systems, brakes, no-starts, mobile and roadside — and which of those can wait until Tuesday.
- It knows the callers. An owner-operator with one truck down is a different call from a fleet maintenance manager scheduling six PMs, and it treats them differently.
- It knows the stakes. A truck in your lot is a driver not earning. Urgency is built into how it triages, not bolted on.
What we are not
We are not a shop management system, and we don't want to replace yours. We're not trying to be your invoicing, your parts ordering or your tech workflow. Fullbay and Mitchell 1 are good at that.
We do one job: make sure the phone is answered, the details are captured, and the job is on the schedule. That's it. That's the whole product.
Who built this
Fifteen years behind the wheel before a line of this was written.
Brian Horton drove over-the-road for fifteen years. He hauled freight across the country, sat in dealership waiting rooms, worked with independents and fleet maintenance shops, and watched the same thing happen in every one of them: the phone rang, and there was nobody to pick it up.
DieselDesk AI is built for the shops he sat in. That's the only market it serves, and the only market it's going to serve.
"I know what it's like to have a truck down and get sent to voicemail. You don't leave a message and wait — you hang up and call the next shop. I built this so that call gets answered and that job stays yours."
Brian HortonFounder, DieselDesk AI · 15 years OTR
The offer
One package. One price. Twenty-five founding shops.
No Basic, no Pro, no Enterprise. No feature that's held back to sell you an upgrade. One all-inclusive package at $899 a month.
Founding Partner · 25 of 25 left
The founding seat
$899/month, all-inclusive
$499 onboarding — waived when you pay annually. Annual is two months free.
- Your price is locked for life. We will raise the list price. You will never pay it.
- Onboarding done for you — agent build, calendar, call flow, escalation rules
- Direct line to the founder, not a support queue
- You shape the roadmap — founding shops decide what gets built next
- Month-to-month. Thirty days' notice, no exit fee, your data exported on request.
We take shops we're confident we can help. If yours isn't one, we'll say so.
Why there's no free trial
Because free pilots are how this product gets set up badly, ignored for three weeks, and judged on a version nobody tuned. We've watched it happen elsewhere and we're not doing it.
Instead you get the two things a trial was supposed to give you, without the theatre:
- Hear it before you pay a cent. Call the agent, push on it, try to break it. Then decide.
- Leave whenever you want. Month-to-month, thirty days' notice. If it isn't earning, don't keep it.
Published fair use
2,000 AI minutes a month included — roughly 800 calls, which is more than any single-location shop in our research has ever run. Past that it's $0.35 a minute, and we'll tell you before you get there. We don't say "unlimited," because we won't promise something we can't underwrite.
Straight talk
What we can't show you yet
We're new. There are no customer testimonials on this website because we don't have customers to quote yet — and inventing them is not something we're willing to do. When founding shops have results, we'll publish them with their names and their numbers on them.
We also took three statistics off this site that we used to run — including the "85% of callers who reach voicemail never call back" figure you'll see on half the sites in this category. We went looking for the original study and there isn't one. If a number is on this page now, it has a named source next to it.
What you can check today: the agent itself. Call it. That's the only proof that actually matters before you buy.
Questions
Straight answers
Judge that yourself before you spend anything — call the demo line and push on it. It's built to sound like a sharp service writer, and you sign off on how yours sounds before it ever takes a live call. Anything it can't handle goes to a person.
No, and most shops shouldn't. It covers what slips: the second line, lunch, the parts run, nights and weekends. Your writer keeps the relationships and stops losing the calls he was never going to reach.
No. You keep the number on your truck, your sign and your invoices. You forward the calls that aren't getting answered — busy, no-answer, after-hours, or all of them. Nothing your customers dial changes.
Because it isn't software you operate — it's a shift someone has to cover. A five-user Fullbay Elite subscription runs about $794 a month and doesn't answer a single call. A part-time person to cover the same hours costs $2,724 fully loaded and goes home. On gross profit, two and a half recovered repair orders a month covers it.
Days, not months. Your part is a kickoff conversation about your services, hours, rates and escalation rules, plus forwarding your line. We build, tune and test the agent, you approve it, and it goes live.
The shop that answers, wins.
Your next call is either a booked job or a competitor's.
Twenty-five founding seats at $899 a month, locked for life. Hear the agent first — then decide whether one of them is yours.