Fleet Maintenance

Sunstar EMS performs all vehicle maintenance and repair work for critical failures in-house, except major body repair and vehicle towing. This practice allows us to control the quality of work on our units and related costs. Direct control of maintenance guarantees that our units are safe, reliable and available in numbers sufficient to meet normal as well as extraordinary demands.

Our preventive maintenance program pursues the goal of zero critical failures by constantly monitoring component life and mechanic performance. A critical failure is any incident in which a specific ambulance dispatched to or needed for a call cannot respond to the patient or complete a call, due to mechanical problems with the vehicle itself.

Every Sunstar EMS ambulance receives scheduled services at internals of 4,000 miles or 300 engine hours, which ever comes first. Certain vehicles require customized service intervals, depending on the year of manufacture, type of transmission, chassis and brake system. We also adjust the preventive maintenance program for administrative and support vehicles, since they are subject to less strenuous use than our ambulances

Sunstar EMS scientifically studies wear and tear on parts to ensure we do not exceed their safe useful life. For example, to determine the best interval for oil changes, we contracted with a vehicle performance research company to run ambulances on a track for extended periods. The results determined that a 5,000-mile interval was appropriate. To exceed these requirements, Sunstar EMS performs the service every 4,000 miles.