Written by Bill Ward

Managing Idle Fuel Costs

There's an old adage, "You Can't Manage What You Can't Measure!" and that's especially true when talking about Excessive Idle Fuel Consumption."

Prior to working for Tracker Systems I worked for Cummins for 28 years and helped them develop their first 'Advanced Information Products Manager Program'. I also had an opportunity to participate in a number of the long term idling studies.

Idling is a necessary evil as well as a significant cost factor in your annual fuel costs, so many fleets will take measures to try to keep vehicle idling to a minimum. It should be noted that a heavy duty, class 8 vehicle will typically burn 1.5-2.0 gallons per hour. The engine spec sheets will show only about .7 gallon per hour, but that's under ideal, 'no load' conditions. In the real world, with fan motors, heaters, air conditioning, etc. it's much higher.

Additionally, there is the cost of maintenance, because 1 hour of idle has been found to be the equivalent of about 80 highway miles. Some fleets have found that their vehicles were 'aging' the equivalent of 50-60,000 miles per year due just to excessive idling. This showed up in reductions in their annual fleet maintenance costs once they put a monitoring and management system in place.

One of our customers operates longhaul, Class 8 fleet vehicles and had been tracking his drivers with GPS cellular phones. For the most part, he was satistfied with the ability to be able to 'see where the drivers were at' at the start of each day, this saved him from having to call each driver on the phone to verify their location.

Last year they put Tracker's embedded vehicle unit into one of the vehicles that also had a cellphone. Primarily, the owner was concerned with some the of the areas when there was no cellular coverage, and because the embedded units provide store-and-forward capabilities, he was able to now see where his driver had been and also noticed that the reliability of the Tracker unit was much better than the phone, even in areas of good coverage. The Tracker unit also had the ability to show when the vehicle was idling.

What really surprised the owner was something he had not expected to see, namely that his driver was idling the vehicle, sometimes in excess of 10 hours per day. Vehicles can burn up to 2.0 gallons of fuel per hour when idling with an air conditioner or heater blower motor running, and with fuel costs nearing $4/gallon, it would make much more sense to have his driver get a hotel room. What surprised the owner was that that was already his policy, "No Idling- We Will Pay for the Hotel Room!" Morale of the story, 'now that he can measure the vehicle's (idling) behavior, he can also manage it'.