If your business involves vehicles on the move, it’s almost certain that you know all about how expensive fuel can be. But nevertheless, it’s worth putting it down on paper just to remind ourselves.
According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, a typical HGV in a typical transportation company might cover 100,000 miles in a year.
That same HGV might average 10 miles to the gallon – on a good day. Which means 10,000 gallons used in a year.
In the US, you might pay $4 a gallon for your fuel. Which means the fuel for one HGV, for one year, will cost you $40,000. In Europe, of course, you can multiply that number by at least 1.5, meaning an annual cost of $60,000 for fuel.
In a fleet of 200 vehicles, that is an annual bill of $12,000,000 for fuel.
Like I say, most of us know this (even if we try to suppress that knowledge). So why go over it all again? Well, to remind us of something that should be obvious: if you can reduce that bill by even a small amount – say 2% – that still means a significant amount to your business.
2% of $12,000,000 is $240,000.
And the truth is, most businesses could save even more. Most estimates suggest that smarter, more thoughtful driving styles can actually mean using 10 to 15% less fuel. So what I promise is our final sum of the day looks like this:
15% of $12,000,000 is $1,800,000
So it is worth making the effort. Let’s talk about what that looks like.
Four ways to save fuel
Let’s keep things simple. Your business can save fuel by:
- Routing vehicles in the most efficient manner possible
- Driving at more efficient speeds (and avoiding truly excessive speeds)
- Avoiding harsh braking and acceleration as much as possible
- Reducing idling as much as possible
Let’s talk about each of those in turn.
The importance of efficient routing should be obvious. Having vehicles moving backwards and forwards between jobs at random, or based on the best guess of the driver, is a fast route to the poor house.
Telematics solutions such as Geotab enable automated, efficient routing and save you fuel as a result
There’s also no excuse for it in 2025. The right telematics product will ensure that every route and schedule is perfectly optimized, and indeed identify when two or more vehicles are operating overlapping routes that can be simplified. That includes the ability to change routes on the fly as situations change, or identify which vehicle is best positioned to attend to a particular job at any moment in time.
Better driving habits
Encouraging drivers to drive at more efficient speeds can have a dramatic effect on your total fuel consumption. Did you know, for example, that the average HGV can consume up to 40% more fuel when driven at 60mph when compared to 50mph? And the higher the speed gets, the worse fuel consumption becomes?
Obviously, it can be appropriate to drive at high speed (within the law). But in most cases it will pay to reduce your speed. Fortunately, solutions like CameraMatics are able to provide speeding alerts when drivers maintain speeds over thresholds set by the organization, which in turn enables driver education to be focused on real-life events rather than abstract guidelines about ‘best practice’.
Exactly the same logic applies to harsh braking and acceleration and idling time. The latter, by the way, costs more than a gallon of fuel per hour of idling, so it adds up. Both can be (and should be) detected by your telematics solution, and fleet managers should be constantly analyzing this data to identify drivers that need additional, personalized coaching. It can also be worthwhile to look at driver performance and fuel efficiency overall in order to spot issues with either vehicles or drivers.
Even beyond driving habits, a change in fuel efficiency for a particular vehicle may indicate the need for maintenance. Indeed modern AI-powered telematics solutions are able to detect when maintenance is required by looking at numbers like these.
In all cases, what matters is just that: being aware of the data and constantly looking for the common issues that can mean your business is using more fuel than it needs to.
Conclusion: Thinking about ROI
The recurring theme here is data. Gathering it, and analyzing it, to ensure that your efforts to save fuel are targeted and effective. And there’s no getting away from it, that means spending money on a sophisticated telematics system, and the time of a fleet manager to read that data and act upon it.
But even a serious telematics solution costs somewhere in the region of a dollar a day per vehicle, or 365 dollars a year. Compare that to the numbers we looked at earlier in the piece. It is less than 1% of the total fuel bill for a single vehicle. And that is before we think of all the other benefits that such a solution delivers.
The conclusion is straightforward. Most of us know how to reduce our fuel bills. We just need to commit to the investment, both in terms of time and money, that will deliver actually make it happen and deliver serious savings to the business.
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