Significant reduction in fleet idling reduces fuel costs by $600 per truck, per year

A 20,000-customer package delivery company found its fuel costs skyrocketing. Based on a detailed business case from Netistix™ Technologies, the company began an eight-city trial of the Netistix FleetPulse™ system on its delivery vehicles across the country.

The goal was clear: reduce fuel costs in a quantifiable way. Although rising gas prices were an obvious contributing factor, the company’s fleet manager suspected that aggressive driving and excessive idling were also primary causes of the rising fuel costs. What tipped him off? Fuel consumption rates varied wildly from vehicle to vehicle, even though the units were equally maintained and traveled similar routes.

In addition to the fuel cost implications, inappropriate driver behavior – if it was indeed occurring – was in violation of the company’s policies. Such policies, including speed and idling limitations for all drivers, was in place for good reasons: safety, insurance and environmental considerations that impact any fleet company’s brand and business.

Today, FleetPulse provides the package delivery company with three key items of data that have empowered the fleet manager to proactively control fuel-abusing driving habits:

• The FleetPulse “Fuel and Safety” report identifies daily top speed along with the amount of time spent traveling over legal speed limits. These readings are displayed both for individual vehicles as well as for the overall fleet for easy comparison between vehicles.
• The same report also shows idle times in total minutes per shift or per day, in longest idling event displays, and in a counter which indicates the number of idle events lasting less than four minutes or less than two minutes, representing a typical drive through lane times and traffic light wait times. These readings are also available in single vehicle and overall fleet reports.
• FleetPulse also reports vehicle acceleration and braking in both hard and extreme modes and provides event counts per day for each of these readings. The interface features a handy calendar search function that displays an historic view for comparison.

Armed with this new information, the company’s fleet manager has been able to reduce discretionary fleet idling time by nearly 80%, resulting in projected fuel savings of $600 per truck in the first year. FleetPulse also made a major discovery: some of the fleet’s vehicles were literally running non-stop from morning to night – even during days where a vehicle would have 50 or more scheduled stops.

FleetPulse has also provided the company with indisputable and accurate native data from vehicle engines (not GPS location-based derived data) that allows the fleet manager to address problem drivers and speeding. The company can now better enforce its corporate policies, and can quickly confirm the success of individual employee coaching with respect to driving habits. It turns out that frequent reminders to drivers, backed up by hard engine data, is effective in changing behaviors. In fact, the company confirms that most drivers are now adhering closely to the speed limit set out in its policies.

Other reported benefits include reduced vehicle repair and maintenance costs thanks to more responsible driving activities and fewer diagnostics scans fees each year. Fewer collision events can also improve driver safety, lower insurance premiums and health costs.

Based on your fleet data, Netistix can develop a business case analysis for the FleetPulse system in your fleet.

Contact Netistix today for a custom business case or live demo.