Merchants Fleet puts 113 shared vans to work in Puerto Rico

One hundred thirteen Merchants Fleet-managed vehicles went live in Puerto Rico on Sept. 14, powering last-mile deliveries for an unnamed global e-commerce company. It's the first time FleetShare, Merchants' app-based vehicle access program, has operated outside the continental United States.

The company confirmed the deployment on Oct. 20. Drivers at the Puerto Rico site reserve and unlock their vehicles through a mobile app — no keys handed over at a counter, no dispatcher working down a whiteboard. That's the whole point of the product.

The scale of the program behind the deal is considerably larger than this single site. FleetShare now covers more than 8,000 managed vehicles across North America. Merchants Fleet, which leases vehicles to package delivery companies, built the program for last-mile delivery, utility and other fleets that share vehicles among multiple drivers rather than assigning one van per person.

What does FleetShare actually replace?

Think about how a shared depot fleet usually runs. A driver arrives, someone finds the right key, someone else logs who took which vehicle, and utilization lives in a spreadsheet nobody trusts. FleetShare strips that out.

The system pairs connected key boxes with driver profiles plus reservation and assignment tools. Fleet managers see assignments, availability and utilization in one place. The key boxes run on cellular service, so they work wherever there's power and a connection — and, critically, they operate independently of a customer's Wi-Fi or local network. For an island site far from a mainland IT stack, that matters.

Merchants has been adding capability, not just territory. In October 2025 it shipped three new features, Work Truck reported: keyless access through automaker and third-party integrations, geofencing, and end-of-use driver surveys. Geofencing gives managers a way to see where vehicles actually travel; the surveys feed driver feedback into the same platform.

What's the commercial read for shippers?

For last-mile operators, the pitch is asset efficiency: shared pools with automated access cut the idle time and administrative drag that come with hand-assigned vehicles. For Merchants, Puerto Rico proves the platform travels — that cellular-based hardware doesn't need a mainland support footprint to function.

Whitney Reynolds, vice president of FleetShare at Merchants Fleet, framed the launch in strategic terms. "Our expansion into Puerto Rico is more than geographic growth," she said. "It demonstrates FleetShare's flexibility and reinforces our vision of helping organizations rethink how they manage fleet operations."

The program isn't sized for any single class of customer, she added. "Whether a customer is operating dozens of vehicles or thousands across multiple locations, FleetShare helps simplify fleet management," Reynolds said.

What the deal doesn't tell us

The gaps are wide. The release names neither the customer nor the contract terms, and pricing stays undisclosed. We don't know what types of vehicles make up the 113-unit Puerto Rico fleet, how they're serviced on the island, or whether Merchants plans to add more.

For now, the vehicle count is the only hard measure of the deal's size.

The open question for the months ahead is whether this becomes a template — other island and cross-border last-mile operations watching whether app-based access holds up outside the continental U.S. — or stays a single-site pilot. Merchants has given no timetable for further expansion.