Diesel Is Breaking Records While Gasoline Stays Cheap, And The Reason Is Not What Most Truckers Think

For the better part of eight months the price of diesel has climbed to levels that gasoline has not come close to matching, and for a carrier whose single largest variable cost is the fuel in the tank, that split is not a curiosity but a direct hit to the bottom line, which is why a recent F3 conversation with Patrick De Haan, the GasBuddy analyst who has tracked pump prices since 2009, is worth carriers understanding in full, because the force driving diesel to records has far less to do with the price of oil than almost anyone at the counter assumes.

De Haan, whose firm tracks gasoline and diesel at roughly 150,000 stations across the United States and Canada and has been helping motorists find lower prices for 26 years, called this the single most volatile stretch he has seen, and not because of one dramatic spike. Volatility normally arrives with a hurricane or a geopolitical flare-up and fades in a week or two. This has run since March, cooling in June and July, roaring back in August and September, and never really settling. What makes it different from the last big run-up, though, is that diesel and gasoline have completely decoupled, and the reasons expose how little the fuel most truckers buy actually tracks the headlines about crude.

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