Fuel costs account for 28-30% of most fleet’s budgets. Considering how much fuel costs, this makes reducing fuel consumption one of the most important issues facing fleet managers. Culprits such as prolonged idling and excessive speeding make driver behavior the number one factor in fuel consumption.
A speed and idling monitoring solution allows managers to monitor idling, instances of excessive speed, and unauthorized use of their fleet vehicles. Armed with this information, they can address wasteful driver behaviors to significantly reduce the amount of fuel consumed by their fleet and save their company money.
An urban paratransit agency that recently began piloting a speed a monitoring system was immediately able to identify over 17 hours of unnecessary idling per vehicle in a single week. This costs the agency almost $35 per vehicle, per week in wasted fuel. Extended to their 650 vehicle fleet, the agency would waste more than $1.6 million dollars a year in fuel from excess idling.
Using fuel cost-effectively can be a challenge for fleet-based organizations. Fuel is responsible for one of the highest operating costs of transportation businesses, and managing this expense is even more important when prices are fluctuating. BUS Ride has a useful article on fuel management systems. Read it here.
This fun animated demo explains how speed and idling monitoring works, how it saves you money, and illustrates what kind of ROI you can expect. Click here to check it out.
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)
A blog for those of us who live and work in fleet management. Topics include engine diagnostics, driver safety, mobile workforce management, CAD/AVL, vehicle maintenance, truck distribution, global computing, work order management, and field services.
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