Vehicle fault prediction is becoming one of the main goals in manufacturers’ maintenance strategies to reduce the number and severity of quality problems in vehicles. Hundreds of vehicle sensors can be used for the early detection of component breakdowns. This work introduces a breakdown prediction approach based on vehicle usage over time. This study proposes a steered optimization system using an evolutionary algorithm called Genetic Algorithm coupled with an Elastic technique to select the most informative predictors. Then, a specific kind of ensemble technique, namely stacking, is utilized for the final prediction. The proposed system has been applied to a complex problem of predictive maintenance to forecast components’ failures. The experimental evaluations on the real usage data collected from thousands of heavy-duty trucks justify the proposed approach is promising.