High Diesel Prices Put Fleet Efficiency Under the Microscope

Every fleet manager knows the feeling of watching the pump price tick up and realizing there is nothing to be done about it. Diesel is set by forces no carrier controls. What a carrier does control is how much of every gallon it puts to work, and elevated fuel prices have a way of exposing habits that were quietly costing money all along. Idling that seemed tolerable at lower prices gets harder to ignore. So does a truck whose fuel economy has slipped unnoticed, or a driver whose habits show up in the fuel bill before they show up in a crash report.

“None of us can control the price at the pump,” said Josh Lovan, Industry Business Advisor at J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc. “What fleets can control is how efficiently they operate, how closely they monitor their costs and how quickly they respond when something doesn’t look right.”

That framing shifts the question. Instead of asking how a fleet absorbs a fuel spike, it asks which parts of the operation are leaking value, and whether anyone is positioned to catch it.

Cost control begins with knowing the real number and Lovan says the first step is understanding what higher fuel prices are doing to profitability.

This story was originally published by FreightWaves. Read the full story at FreightWaves →