Vehicle Register & Driver Assignment

The problem this kills

Ask three people in your company who's driving van #7 and you'll get four answers. The fleet "register" is a spreadsheet someone updated last spring, a stack of insurance binders, and a group chat where assignments happen by emoji. A driver leaves and nobody updates the record. A vehicle goes in for repair and still shows as on the road. A van gets sold and three months later you're still paying to insure it. When a toll, a ticket, or - worse - an accident comes in, nobody can say for certain who was behind the wheel that day.

The root problem isn't laziness. It's that there's no single, trusted place that answers two simple questions: which vehicle is this, and who's responsible for it right now? Plates and VINs get mistyped or duplicated. Two managers each "assign" the same pickup. A status change happens in someone's head but never on paper. And because anyone can edit the spreadsheet, no change is ever really official - so none of it can be trusted.

This tool replaces the honor-system spreadsheet with a real register and a controlled assignment process. A vehicle's driver isn't changed because someone typed it in - it's changed because a request was raised, the fleet manager approved it, and the system recorded exactly who did what and when.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Imports your vehicle list from a CSV (plate, VIN, make/model, year, status, current driver/department, location) and your driver / department list.
• Dedupes on VIN and plate at import, so the same vehicle can't sneak in twice under a typo.
• Lets a coordinator or branch manager request a driver or department assignment for a vehicle.
• Requires the fleet manager to approve before the vehicle's driver/holder field is actually committed - nothing changes on a request alone.
• Enforces one active driver per vehicle - assigning a new holder cleanly ends the old assignment.
• Runs a controlled reassignment flow to move a vehicle from one driver to another, with the same approval gate.
• Manages a status lifecycle - active / in repair / sold / totaled - where status changes also need sign-off.
• Lets you attach documents (registration, insurance) to each vehicle in secure storage.
• Shows a live register of every vehicle, its current holder, status, and location, and exports a clean CSV for your fleet or telematics system.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how vehicles get assigned today, what your vehicle list actually looks like (your real column names, how you write plates and VINs, your unit-number convention), who counts as a "driver" versus a "department," what your status words really are, and your messiest edge cases (a pool vehicle with no fixed driver, a leased van vs. an owned one, a vehicle mid-assignment that gets totaled). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your fleet, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model.
• The full build: database, login, vehicle + driver import with dedupe, the assignment request form, the fleet-manager approval gate, the reassignment flow, the status lifecycle, document attachments, and the CSV export.
• The hard human approval gate and the one-active-driver logic, enforced in code.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to your fleet or telematics system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a fleet and facilities team actually needs:

• Login so only your team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only see the vehicles and assignments that belong to your organization.
• A complete audit trail - every assignment, approval, rejection, reassignment, and status change is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI drafts and routes the assignment, but the vehicle's driver/holder field is committed only after the fleet manager signs off; nothing is ever auto-applied.
• Sign-off on status changes too - moving a vehicle to repair, sold, or totaled needs approval, so the register stays trustworthy.
• Duplicate guards - dedupe on VIN and plate, and one active driver per vehicle so two people can't hold the same vehicle at once.

Who it's for

Fleet managers, facilities and operations managers, and branch managers with a handful (or a few hundred) of vehicles who are tired of a register that's wrong the moment a driver changes - and who want a real, auditable assignment process without buying a heavyweight fleet-management platform or hiring a developer. You don't need to write code. You need your vehicle list, your driver list, and a weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.