Monday, March 22nd, 2010
The results are in. Monitoring your fleet’s activities is one of the easiest ways to lower your operating costs. With the release of Mentor Fleet Monitor early in 2010, we’ve been running pilot projects with a variety of clients. Here are some of their preliminary findings:
Idling Monitoring
A major utility company piloting idling monitoring on seven vehicles identified that between $45 and $134 was wasted in fuel each month from unnecessary idling. When extended to their 4500 vehicle fleet, unnecessary idling would cost the company over $86,000 in wasted fuel per month. A 50% reduction in idling, accomplished by identifying negative driver behaviors with the information provided in the idling monitoring reports, would result in a cost savings of more than $500,000 a year.
Speed Monitoring
Using speed monitoring on a nine vehicle subset of their fleet, a major urban paratransit agency identified over 1400 speed threshold violations in one week. Their reports showed that drivers reached a top speed of 87 miles per hour, 32 miles per hour over the pre-set limit. Drivers travelling at these speeds would cost the agency an additional $1.28 per gallon of gas, not to mention significantly increasing the risk of an accident. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), each five miles per hour above the speed limit has the net effect of increasing the cost of a gallon of gas by twenty cents.
Automatic Vehicle Location
A Canadian paratransit agency implemented AVL technology to monitor a twelve vehicle subset of their fleet and optimize driving behaviors. The agency eliminated over 140 unnecessary miles each month. Projected to the 17 vehicle fleet, using AVL to optimize routing will save the agency over 2400 miles or 173 gallons of fuel over a year.
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Speeding might get your drivers where they need to go a little bit quicker, but what are the real costs of this behavior for your organization? Take a look at these ROI numbers, and you might be surprised:
- Each mile per hour above 50 mph increases fuel consumption by 1.5% percent. A truck, which averages 8 mpg at 50 mph, will average 6.8 mpg at 60 mph. (Argonne National Laboratories)
- Increasing speed from 55 to 75 mph can increase fuel consumption by 39%, while cutting the effectiveness of fuel-efficient tires by 27%, (2009, Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations, LLC, Real Answers Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 3)
- By tracking and controlling driver speeding behavior, a company can reduce accidents by a significant percentage. An accident reduction of 5% for a 50-vehicle fleet amounts to nearly 3 fewer accidents each year. The total savings available is between $18,000 and $36,000 annually. (“Fleet ‘Soft Costs’ Can be Measured and Addressed,” in Automotive Fleet Magazine, June 2006.)
Friday, July 17th, 2009
Hello everyone! There’s lots of talk out there about monitoring idling as a way to cut costs. For our first post, I thought we’d get right into some ROI numbers to give you food for thought:
- According to the DOT, an average truck burns 0.9 gallons of fuel per hour idling. A typical owner with 5 vehicles idling for about 1 hour a day is wasting 4.5 gallons of fuel each day. At an average fuel cost of $5.67 US per gallon, that’s $25.54 US a day, $127.72 a week and $6,641.44 US a year. (GEOTrac)
- 60 minutes of idling is equivalent to between 80 and 120 minutes of driving time. The resulting loss of fuel economy from excessive idling can add up to 800 gallons of fuel annually for the average truck. (Argonne National Laboratories)
- Reducing idle time by 10% increases efficiency by 1 mpg to 2 mpg, and most fleets achieve more than a 55% reduction in idle time within 6 weeks of implementing a GPS fleet management program. A fleet of 5 vehicles loses, on average, around $1600 per year, per vehicle, by not managing engine idling. (Integrated Solutions, January 2008)
