With the cost of fuel over $3 per gallon, by far, the easiest way to save money with the GPS Insight product is to curb your fleet’s idling activity.
A GPS Insight salesperson asked our tech support to look into one of his customers’ vehices today, since he used it in a demonstration and it showed as having been idling for more than 23 HOURS. 23 HOURS!
Because we get our idling data off of the engine’s computer using RPM and battery voltage it is always 100% accurate. Other products can’t tell the difference between someone sitting with the key in “ACC” mode so they can listen to the radio and whether or not the engine is really running.
So, once we double-checked to see that the vehicle was truly idling, I decided it was the perfect candidate to compute just how much money 1 hour of idling costs a company.
Since the vehicle started idling at 9:09:39 on Wednesday, and ultimately stopped idling at 10:31 on Thursday, for over a 24 hour period of time, I decided to calculate how much fuel it burned through to determine a fairly accurate “waste” rate.
I determined when it started and stopped idling by running a GPS Insight 3D history map for today and yesterday like this (3 mouse clicks to choose the vehicle, the dates, and run the report).
It takes about a second to pull down that data, and we see that the vehicle finally turns itself off at 10:31:16:
So, now I can check the diagnostics side of the GPS Insight solution to see how many gallons of fuel were consumed during that period:
At close to the time the vehicle STOPPED idling (1/24 at 10:22 AM), the vehicle had a cumulative total idle fuel used of 1945 gallons, per our diagnostics history, which updates roughly every 40 minutes:
Roughly when the vehicle started idling, there were only 1928 gallons of fuel used at that point:
That’s a difference of 1945 – 1928 gallons = 17 gallons of diesel.
17 gallons of diesel for 25.5 hours of idling time.
That’s 2/3rds of a gallon of diesel per hour.
At Diesel at $3.25 a gallon, that’s $55.25 for one day’s worth of tracking, and more than what the cost of GPS Insight is per month.
How much does this truck idle? Let’s pull a report for a few days:
Why could that be? Well, the company is in the horse transport business, and it’s probably to keep their horses warm in the Winter months if they aren’t able to board them immediately.
Let’s pull the weather quickly into the high end, 3D Google Earth-based GPS Insight mapping:
It’s only 45 degrees F where they’re parked, and there may not be enough room where it’s warm to house these horses. They’re probably keeping them warm by running the engine to the truck. Of course I have no idea if that’s the case — just an educated guess. But thanks to this very long idle stop, I now have a good statistic for how much an hour of idling costs a truck owner — 2/3 of $3.25 per gallon = $2.16 an hour.
Rob.