Apparently that’s what is starting to happen with Diesel nearing $6 per gallon.
We got a call from a long-time customer asking for our help sorting out the crazy behavior he was seeing from a brand new employee driving one of his big rig trucks. Since not all of our customers use every feature (notably our 3-D mapping in this case), we occasionally help customers out with these types of investigative requests.
The new driver was driving back and forth in a particular part of town, stopping for a period of time, then doing it again.
It became clear to us what was happening as soon as we pulled up these pictures (plus the police filled us in on the details once he was questioned):
High concentration of activity inside the town the driver should have driven straight through:
Zooming down, we see a semi-truck driving around almost canvassing the local area looking for people to buy diesel from him in order to fund his drug habit:
Here is one apparent set of stops where he is siphoning fuel out of his tanks and selling it on the side of the road.
Here is another where much of the activity seems to have taken place (note how many red, yellow, and blue dots there are — they correspond to stops > 1 hour, stops < 1 hour, and idle stops):
Our customer called the state troopers which were hesitant to do anything about it until he told them the driver was severely incoherent on the cell phone when he called him. Then they were happy to pull the driver over (with GPS Insight’s help pinpointing the location), and arrest him for driving while under the influence. Our customer had to have someone drive to pick up the truck and trailer, but that beats any of the other possible outcomes:
- lost vehicle
- wrecked vehicle with a driver under the influence of drugs
- harm to other drivers/pedestrians by the driver
- stolen/illegally sold goods in the trailer
This is the second “drugged up driver” we’ve helped a customer with in the past two weeks, and we’ve heard MANY stories from thankful customers of how they’re able to detect, and immediately put an end to problems such as this by watching new driver behavior closely, monitoring for off-hours/weekend usage, excessive speeding, etc. — all using the GPS Insight product which costs between $1-2 per day.
If we were curious how much time, how many miles, and and how many stops were made in this town, we could just draw a quick polygon landmark around it and run a report (as I did here):
Then run a quick report (.36 seconds to complete for all vehicles & 7 days history):
This report is available in this format only at GPS Insight:
It clearly shows that truck 402 drove 100 miles in this small area in one day, which itself cost roughly $90 (I ran a MPG report and saw this vehicle gets 6.2 MPG, and guessed that diesel costs $5.50 in that area). The time spent in that small area was 14 1/2 hours.
The next truck to enter and exit took only 2-4 minutes to get through town, and was probably the vehicle used to drop off a driver to retrieve the vehicle after the driver was arrested.
This is obviously a sad situation, but could have been a whole lot more sad if our customer wasn’t scrutinizing his new driver’s activity, and had we not been able to show him very clearly what was going on. By alerting the police and ending it quickly, everyone is a lot happier with the end of the story (maybe even eventually the driver).