What are some ways you can control fuel costs for your fleet vehicles?
When you’re a fleet manager, fuel costs are often the largest expense. You may be frustrated by rising fuel costs, but there are things you can do to take control of those costs proactively.
Keep Tires Properly Inflated
One way to improve fuel efficiency and control costs for your fleet vehicles is to keep the tires on your vehicles properly inflated. Add a tire pressure check to the daily or weekly checklist for drivers for their vehicles, and you’ll soon see a return in the fuel cost area as properly inflated tires can improve fuel efficiency from 0.6% to up to 3%.
Avoid Unnecessary Idling
Training your drivers to turn their vehicles off rather than letting them idle can result in significant fuel savings. Although starting a vehicle more times throughout the day can use more fuel, the cost is offset in favor of turning the vehicle off since idling only wastes fuel.
Set Speed Restrictions for Drivers
If you use a fleet tracking system that measures the speed at which the vehicles are traveling, you can monitor the driver’s speed and train them to keep their speed at optimal levels. Many of these systems allow you to alert drivers when their speed exceeds the optimal rate.
Avoid Aggressive Driving
Many of the tips for saving fuel depend on proper driver training and re-training. Encouraging drivers to avoid aggressive driving, like fast acceleration from a full stop and hard braking, can significantly affect fuel costs. This type of training may even help with fleet repair costs, especially those associated with brake maintenance and repair and any collision repairs prompted by accidents on the road.
Fuel costs are often a significant part of the cost of managing your fleet. Still, they are controllable by you, the fleet manager, if you take some of these tips to heart. At the West Automotive Group in San Diego, CA, the technicians would be happy to talk with you about ways to help reduce fuel costs through fleet maintenance and repair. Give us a call today to make an appointment to discuss your fleet maintenance needs today.
