Monitor Your Trucks Idle Times: Why You Should Care
3 Jun 2008With the rising cost of fuel these days to over $4 dollars a gallon, it is important to be able to monitor your trucks out on the road to make sure that they are not wasting time, gas and money. An excellent way to achieve this is by using a GPS tracking system. If you have not already implemented the use of these nifty little devices for your company, you will after reading this!
Let us look at a case study…. Bob owns a delivery company and has 10 vehicles. Each vehicle has a 30 gallon gas tank. With the cost of gas being about $4 dollars this means that it will cost on average 120 dollars to fill each tank. This means that it will cost about $1200.00 dollars to fill the entire truck fleet. And all of this before they have even made any money.
If your employees are anything like other drivers out there, they will pull up to their stop and let their truck idle while they are making the pick up or delivery. Sometimes the truck will sit their for 10 to 15 minutes or longer at a stretch idling. In essence, if your trucks are making on average 12 stops a day this means that they are leaving their vehicle idle for approximately 120 minutes a day. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, for every hour that a truck is left idling it equals about 80 to 120 minutes of driving time. This means that if your truck is 120 minutes (2 hours) of idling times then essentially they are wasting about 240 minutes of driving time. If all 10 of your trucks are doing the same thing then your fleet is wasting about 20 hours per day idling.
Letting the trucks idle for 20 hours a day means that they will be wasting over 200 gallons of gas on a monthly basis. In other words they are wasting around 800 dollars a month of gas. By implementing a GPS fleet management tracking system, you can put a stop to all this wasted money.
A GPS fleet management tracking system allows you to set up a notification whenever a truck has been idling for a certain amount of time. This time is set by your standards. An alert will be sent to you if any of your vehicles exceeds the standard that you set. You will then be able to address the long idle time with the driver. Over time, your drivers will remember to shut off the truck during a pick up and delivery. This in turn will save your company hundreds if not thousands a year in wasted gas and money.
