Photo: Pablo Ormachea of Motus
By Fleet Management Weekly Staff
September 24, 2025
Not every company can afford to give each employee a designated vehicle. It’s common for employees to use their personal vehicles for professional tasks, then submit their work-related mileage for reimbursement. But parsing work-related expenses from personal expenses can be complicated, especially for businesses with a high volume of employees. That’s why many companies use a reimbursement platform to track and manage driver behavior, accurately recording mileage and delivering fair vehicle reimbursements.
While there are a few one-size-fits-all reimbursement platforms, Motus markets itself as the gold standard in vehicle reimbursements due to its centralized platform and customizable solutions. Motus processes over two billion dollars in reimbursements each year, pairing employees with tax-advantaged strategies to minimize waste. Its unified platform provides companies with visibility into the license status and insurance coverage of all their employees, enabling them to mitigate risk and reduce liability.
To learn more about Motus’s reimbursement solution, as well as its recent report on American drivers, we interviewed Pablo Ormachea, VP of Data at Motus. Here’s how the conversation went:
Motus recently released a report about what Americans drive for work and why. Can you tell us about the report and its findings?
Hundreds of thousands of people who drive for work use Motus to handle reimbursements. For this report, we pulled over a hundred thousand data points from the drivers themselves. We also went a bit deeper, surveying over 4,000 drivers to gain insight into what makes them happy while driving for work and which aspects of different reimbursement programs work best for them.
We found that retention increases by 47% when drivers are given more choice in the vehicle they drive. Another finding that stood out to me was the amount of time they saved. Reimbursement platforms like Motus offer automation tools, which can lead to significant savings in both cost and time. Automation reduces the time spent filling out paperwork by over 21 hours per driver per year. When you free up that time and give drivers more choice, you end up with increased retention and efficiency, which is a win-win for both the company and the driver.
One of the findings showed that 64% of users prefer GPS-based automatic mileage capture over manual input. Can you delve into that more?
We found that drivers prefer not to have to worry about paperwork when they have software that automatically records everything. With GPS-enabled mileage, both the driver and the employer know that the information is correct when it gets sent. Not only does this save over 21 hours per driver per year, but it also enables the company to process expenses more quickly and reduce disputes. Everybody winds up happier once it’s tracked through GPS.
Tell us about user-centric technology solutions. What do they mean for adoption rates and support requests?
Choice is a significant factor in both happiness and efficiency. When we allow drivers to select their own vehicles or when their reimbursements are tied to the region, we’ve seen fewer disputes and higher retention rates. We can not only particularize their experience with the software, but also their experience in terms of understanding the actual costs of their expenses. For example, fuel on the West Coast is 37% higher than it is in the Midwest. In the Northeast, trips tend to be shorter yet costlier than they are on the highways of the South. Having a reimbursement program that allows the drivers to choose where the pricing comes from makes a big difference.
What advice would you give fleet managers who are looking at reimbursement programs?
Fleet managers who are looking for reimbursement policies have a lot of priorities to balance. Those who care the most about retention and efficiency should explore options beyond a one-size-fits-all solution. As we’ve seen from the data, reimbursement programs that allow for individual and driver choice lead to 47% higher retention, 23% faster processing, and 17% fewer disputes. At the same time, automation gives back 21 hours a year to the driver. If a fleet manager wants to achieve these kinds of efficiency gains and make drivers happy enough to stay with the company, I would urge them to explore customized, geographically specific reimbursement solutions for private vehicles.
How do you protect drivers’ data privacy?
We have a privacy-first design, which means we aim to empower drivers to keep their private data out of business systems. To do so, we’ve built an AI tool that flags anomalies outside of normal driver behavior, customized to each driver. For example, a driver might make 10-20 trips of a certain distance in a specific location during specific hours. If they take a trip that doesn’t fit the norm–maybe they took a trip to the clinic or to drop off lunch at their kid’s school–then our technology will flag it so the driver can review and remove it.
Most software wouldn’t know that that’s a special trip, but ours will flag it so that the personal trip never enters the system. This saves time for the admin, who won’t have to go through these trips one by one. They’ll have a firm conviction that everything that comes through is accurate and truly a business trip that needs reimbursement or review.
