Done for you
You are running a shop. You should not also be configuring software. We build it, tune it, and keep it running.
About us
Built by someone who sat in the waiting room.
DieselDesk AI serves one industry. That's not a marketing position — it's the only industry the person who built it actually knows.
Fifteen years over the road
Brian Horton spent fifteen years as a professional truck driver, hauling freight across the country. In that time he dealt with dealership service departments, independent shops and fleet maintenance facilities in more states than he can list.
What he remembers most about all of them is the same thing: the phone ringing, and nobody able to get to it. Service writers with three people at the counter and two lines lit up. Owners answering calls with a torque wrench still in their hand. Waiting rooms full of drivers who had already called four shops before they found one that picked up.
And he was on the other side of it too. A truck down is not an inconvenience — it's a driver not earning, a load not moving, and a customer who is going to hear about it. When you're the one with the breakdown, you don't leave a voicemail and wait for a callback. You hang up and dial the next shop on the list.
DieselDesk AI exists because that call is worth real money to the shop that answers it, and it goes to whoever picks up first. Not the best shop. The available one.
Why we only serve diesel
There is no shortage of AI answering services. Nearly all of them are horizontal — the same product sold to a dental office, a salon, a law firm and a repair shop, with the industry name swapped in the script. They ask for a name and an email address. They don't know that whether the truck is drivable is the question that determines everything else about the call.
We looked hard for a competitor positioned specifically for diesel and heavy-duty and did not find one. Not because it isn't a good market, but because it's a market that requires knowing what a regen is, why a DOT deadline is not negotiable, and the difference between an owner-operator with one truck down and a fleet manager scheduling six PMs.
Serving one industry is a constraint we chose. It's also the only reason the product is any good.
How we work
Four things we hold to
One package
No tiers designed to make the cheap one disappointing. Everything the product does is in the price on the pricing page.
Honest numbers
Sourced or omitted. We removed statistics from this site that we couldn't trace back to a real study, even though they helped us.
Easy to leave
Month-to-month, thirty days, data exported on request. Retention should come from the product working, not from the paperwork.
Sources
Every number we cite, and where it comes from
Most sites in this category quote phone statistics that trace back to nothing. We went and checked. This is the full list of what we use, plus the figures we deliberately removed.
What we cite
- 42% of automotive service calls are never answered by a person — Invoca, 2026 Automotive and Home Services Lead Conversion Benchmarks, based on analysis of more than 70 million calls. Automotive service generally, not diesel-specific.
- 64% of automotive businesses never ask for the appointment on an answered call — Invoca, 2026 benchmarks.
- 57% of heavy-duty shops report being understaffed — Fullbay, 2025–26 State of Heavy-Duty Repair (sixth annual; approximately 900 respondents across 3,400+ shops).
- 30–50% of service call volume falls outside 8am–6pm — Numa, auto service call benchmarks. Reported as a range because that is how it is published.
- Median heavy-duty shop: 8 employees, 5 technicians; labour rate $145–$149/hour — Fullbay, 2025–26 State of Heavy-Duty Repair.
- ~$800 average heavy-duty repair order — Fullbay. This is a best-practice framework figure, not survey output, and it is the weakest number we use. Change it to your own in the calculator.
- Fully loaded California wage figures — US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (43-4171), inflated to 2026, with the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation benefits loading factor of 1.43×. Heavy-duty service advisor from ZipRecruiter, July 2026.
- Human answering service pricing, $400–$1,725/month and $1.60–$2.95/minute — published AnswerForce, AnswerConnect and Ruby rates at comparable call volume.
- Comparison software pricing — published list prices from Fullbay and Mitchell 1 as of July 2026.
What we removed, and why
“85% of callers who reach voicemail never call back” — and its cousin, “62% call a competitor.” This circulates everywhere in this category, usually attributed to Forbes or BIA/Kelsey. The original study is not retrievable. We used it once. We don't any more.
“62% of business calls go unanswered” — traces to a 2016 study of 85 businesses published by an SEO vendor. Too small, too old, too interested.
“$2,400 a month lost to missed calls” and “50% to 97% answer rate” — our own earlier figures. Neither had a defensible source behind it. Both are gone.
Any audited ROI study of AI answering — there isn't one, in any vertical. Anyone showing you one is showing you a vendor case study.
What nobody knows yet
There is no published benchmark for monthly inbound call volume at an independent repair shop, at any duty class. We looked. Our working figure of 300 calls a month is an estimate built from shop size and staffing, and we're measuring it properly across our founding shops.
When we have that number from real shops, we'll publish it — including if it makes our own arithmetic look worse.
The shop that answers, wins.
Talk to the person who built it.
No SDR, no discovery-call script. Hear the agent, then have a straight conversation about whether this fits your shop.