GPS Insight Blog » Fuel Savings

Oct 02 2011

Determine how much fuel and C02 idling is actually costing you and the environment

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Fuel Savings,New Features,New Features,reduced idling,Reports — rdonat @ 7:23 am

We have a customer that really needed to precisely measure how much fuel and CO2 emissions their idling was costing them.

Not all vehicles are created equal, so at the individual vehicle level, we made the fuel type and estimated number of gallons consumed per hour idling something our customers can set.

Here’s how you get there:

Open Vehicle Administration

There is a new option in vehicle admin called “Update fuel and emissions info”:

Update fuel and emissions info

We have a “liters engine size to gallons idled per hour” converter which allows you to plug in your engine size and determine a fairly accurate number of gallons idled away per hour:

compute and override the # of gallons per hour spent idling

Here I am editing a SALES vehicle driven by KEVINJS:

update fuel type and gallons per hour idling

Once you have overridden any defaults necessary (we default to unleaded and .4 gallons per hour spent idling), then you can run your report:

Run an idle report with fuel usage/CO2 emissions

I ran it for the September for the Albuquerque group (ALB) which contains the newly changed 5.0 liter F-150 which burns .55 gallons per hour of diesel:

How much fuel / emissions is idling costing me?

In this case, KEVINJS had roughly 7 hours and 3.863 gallons of idling, which we compute (based on the properties of the different types of fuels) to equate to .034 tons of emissions.

Together, the ALB group idled 512 hours, costing 209.6 gallons of fuel and 1.846 tons of CO2.

Now by using GPS Alerts, you can notify your drivers that they’re idling and ask them to shut down the vehicle with a text message or email (and since they’re idling and not actually driving, there are no distracted driving issues).

Then later on, you can easily determine your fuel and CO2 savings by running this or other idling reports available within GPS Insight.

Enjoy!

Rob

Tags: CO2 emissions, Fleet Tracking, fuel spent idling, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking software, gps vehicle tracking, idling, Vehicle Tracking

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Aug 16 2011

BEWARE! – Not all idling calculations are created equal!

Category: competition,Fuel Savings,Google Earth,reduced idling,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 7:01 pm

We have been in the GPS Tracking industry for almost 7 years now. Enough to learn and FIX the limitations of GPS to ensure the highest quality data possible (e.g. 99.x% — if anyone tells you they’re 100%, well, guess what, they’re not).

So, today I found a perfect example to show the lengths to which we go to make your data 100% reliable (well, 99.x%…).

I had a 7:30 AM phone call and an 8:30 offsite meeting.

I had to get to my meeting by 7:30 so I could sit in my car and get on the call, then be there for my meeting & the breakfast prior.

So I had to idle for almost 40 minutes in order to avoid baking in my car in the hot Phoenix heat.

Here’s my stop report for 2 separate devices installed in my vehicle, both showing a ~37 minute idle stop:

GPS Insight Stop Report

One device (Rob) gets its speed data from the engine’s computer, and is more expensive because of that. One device is less expensive but has to “interpolate” its speed from GPS Satellites traveling 9 THOUSAND miles per hour at over 12 THOUSAND miles in space. And it’s remarkably accurate, but there is unfortunately what we call “positional GPS drift” of up to 20 feet typically.

So when the devices move 5-10 feet due to this “drift,” we interpolate a speed of 1-3 MPH typically. But that means the device doesn’t look like it’s stationary, therefore it’s not idling.

Thankfully GPS Insight has a formula (which can be tweaked for different types of fleets, e.g. slow-moving street sweepers) which “consolidates” multiple drift points into a single idle event and position.

Our customers would never see this “inaccurate” GPS data, but here’s a picture of the REAL LOCATION REPORTS to include the drift for both the 3500 (talks to the engine for speed but not as accurate with GPS) and the 3900 (much more accurate GPS which it derives speed/distance/acceleration from):

175' of drift for the diagnostic device (we fix that)

The “drift” in the picture above is corrected over long idle stops to the “center” point which typically has the most reports.

175' of drift which we "correct" for diagnostic GPS device

15′ of drift for the more accurate 3900 GPS device

For the 3900, the drift is MUCH smaller — only 15′, and again, we “consolidate” that into a single 38 minute idle stop with a single “pin.”

The corrected map looks 100% accurate (well, 99.x%…):

"Fixed" stop locations and idle time

This shows my 2 devices in my car both stopped for ~38 minutes, and 29 feet apart (vs. the 175′ we saw above on the 3500).

And my car is 12′ long, with antennas in the front/back of the vehicle, so that’s not too bad (they show in the right locations +5′ or so each).

We consolidated the GPS drift into a single “valid” point, both in terms of position and time spent idling.

This is a HUGE distinction between GPS Insight and other companies who will either show you that your vehicle was someplace it really wasn’t, or far worse, show you that it wasn’t actually idling when it was.

Without doing all of the processing on “drift points” at 1-3 MPH, you wouldn’t know that the vehicle was actually idling, and you would lose a HUGE component of your potential ROI using GPS Insight.

This is fairly low-level, but I wanted to make sure the extent to which our product validates and consolidates data to make it actionable and insightful (and ACCURATE) isn’t lost.

There’s a big difference between this type of product and a typical “dots on a map” product. You should know there are major differences OTHER than price when it comes to GPS Fleet Tracking.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, fleet tracking system, gps fleet tracking system, GPS Insight accuracy, GPS Tracking, gps tracking devices, gps tracking idling, idling accuracy, truck tracking

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Sep 21 2010

Idling can cost you $2k in New York City!

Category: Alerts,Fuel Savings,GPS Insight Employees,New York City,reduced idling,Scheduled Reports — rdonat @ 9:01 pm

I took a trip recently with my 2 boys to the greatest city on the planet (that I’ve been to yet, that is, & I probably haven’t been to your city yet so don’t get mad at me for saying that).

The Big Apple — New York City.

Everything is idiotically expensive in NYC, especially the fees for idling! $2,000!

$2k if you get caught idling in New York City

With most GPS fleet tracking solutions, a quick idling alert sent to you or weekly idling report will easily and quickly help you avoid such fines. As well as the $4 or so per hour in fuel/wear & tear idling costs your company. Times hundreds of hours per year per vehicle, those savings really add up.

So then you will be able to afford paintings like the one here with my boys (can you tell where we went the night before…?)

Afford a Van Gogh with the money you're not spending on idling and fines!

Or at least enough to take a trip to NYC with your kids & see it for yourself at the MOMA.

Rob.

CEO & highly active founder of GPS Insight

Tags: Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking idling, fleet tracking system, gps fleet tracking companies, GPS Tracking, real time gps tracking, Vehicle Tracking

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Jul 29 2010

New Idle Detail Report & Maps — an industry first (at least I think so…)

Category: Fuel Savings,New Features,reduced idling,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 12:41 pm

We have recently added a really good new Idle Detail Report & Map.

Scrutinizing idle times and improving driver behavior as a result saves our customers a lot of money. Knowing this we added this functionality to allow individual vehicles’ idle times to be examined more closely. Improvements have also been made to the Idle Time Report (to include the ability to “drill down” from the summary to the detail for a particular vehicle/driver).

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Report

The Idle Detail Report can be run on an individual vehicle or a group of vehicles. It will display individual idle events for each selected vehicle, along with the driver, address, and greenhouse gas emissions information for that event. (The odometer values are also shown in the exportable spreadsheet version.) Most of the columns are sortable – note the blue column headers shown below.

The Idle Time Report now allows more columns to be sorted too, including the % Idle column. Clicking on individual vehicle labels will open an Idle Detail Report for the vehicle, with the same parameters that were previously selected. Here is a sample detail report (note that one vehicle idled over 9 HOURS!):

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Report

After pressing the button for “Google Earth” all idle stops in the report are shown on a map (this one is 30 minutes or more):

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Map

Zooming down on another mapped idle stop shows the vehicle in a school parking lot:

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Map

This new report and associated mapping functionality will really help you understand who is idling your vehicles and costing you fuel and wear and tear, and let you instantly drill down to see where & in what context the vehicles are being left on when they’re not moving.

It is available for all customers & can be run for a month at a time.

It is extremely fast — running it for a full month for a customer with 279 vehicles only takes 2 seconds to finish.

Enjoy!

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

Comments (1)

May 18 2010

Sneak peek at our new Trip Efficiency Report!

Category: Alerts,Company Efficiency,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Driver Accountability,Extreme Return on Investment,Fuel Savings,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 10:21 pm

This is a REALLY exciting report, and is the culmination of months of work on top of years of getting ready for this report.

>>> REALLY — It’s A BIG DEAL <<<

This suite of reports will essentially pinpoint your inefficient drivers on an overall as well as a trip-by-trip basis.

Here’s a an early version (the final reports are on the way & will also include an overall vehicle-by-vehicle comparison/summary):

Run the Efficiency Summary Report:

New GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Report

Up comes a graph showing all your drivers’ trips for that period of time (a work week in this case) & how efficient they are relative to both SHORTEST and FASTEST routes which we determine WOULD HAVE BEEN IDEAL:

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Graph

Then looking at the detail, we pick on the top “most inefficient” driver (sorting on # of unnecessary miles beyond the fastest route from A to B):

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Detail

Then hovering over an entry, it tells us that the “James – Garmin” vehicle went 34.2 miles, but only needed to go 19.03.

Difference between actual and ideal fastest route

By clicking on the 3 entries, we instantly pull up the actual (pink), shortest (red), and fastest (blue) routes for a visual comparison:

Visual Representation of Driver Inefficiency

In reality, the “turnaround” out of the way is where several of our employees meet to car pool every day:

Reason for inefficient driving is a carpool drop-off

So this behavior is all right, since it saves a lot of miles and cars on the road.

But look at #2 and #3 on the list (and there are countless more inefficient trips):

Driving way out of way (in Purple) to get from A to B

Driving way out of way (in Orange ) to get from A to B vs. fastest/shortest routes in blue & red

These are our employees & our own cars, so it’s not exactly the end of the world that we’re sometimes driving all over the place inefficiently, & we have our reasons.

But if you run this against your fleet, you will find drivers who:

Get Lost
Make Wrong Turns
Intentionally Take the Long Way (padding hours)
Literally Drive In Circles (and should be probably be fired for fraudulent wasting of fuel/mileage and padding of hours)

This report will be available in late May, and is going to surprise a lot of customers. And probably a lot of drivers too.

It will save our customers a HUGE amount of money on drivers they didn’t know were this inefficient, or were specifically defrauding them of labor hours.

Additionally, it will be available in June as a real-time alert to supervisors as well as drivers to “coach” them on better ways to complete their trips when they do so inefficiently.

Oh, and by the way, on a slow development server, for all 50 of our vehicles for a full work week, that report only took 1/3 of a second to run:

FAST (.36 second) Report

Look forward to it soon!

For more information on our main GPS Fleet Tracking Reports visit our website.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: fleet tracking comapnies, gps fleet reporting, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking reports, gps vehicle tracking

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Apr 15 2010

GPS Insight Saved a Customer $10k a Month by Cutting Idling 75%

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Alerts,Extreme Return on Investment,Fuel Savings,reduced idling,Reports — bbarker @ 1:37 pm

Our reports and proactive alerts help you to ensure your drivers are not idling. It’s both wasteful and impacts our environment.

I pulled up a relatively new customer at random & ran an idling report for them & was happy to see that they CUT THEIR IDLING 75% WITH PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT!

Here is how I ran the report:

Run a GPS Insight Idle Time History Report

The report came up in 1.6 seconds & quantified 33,400 hours of driving since January, and the Purple Line (the important line) shows a marked decrease from a high of 20% idling to a current low of 5%:

75% Reduction in idling percentage

The full report shows all the particulars & shows very clearly the effects of both using GPS Insight as well as managing the drivers to stop idling:

Decrease from 20% to 5% idling over 3 months

Note that this is only one of our thousands of customers, and only 234 vehicles. I like the fact that GPS Insight truly is helping our customers make a big difference both in terms of saving fuel money, and the environment.

Another report shows that they have saved roughly TWO THOUSAND IDLING HOURS across their fleet of 234 vehicles by eliminating that 15% idling (based on 13,000 hours driven in the past month). With fuel costs plus wear & tear easily costing $5 per hour, they’ve seen a $10,000 PER MONTH savings, which is $42 per vehicle. We charge them $32.95. So they make $9 per month just by reducing idling, and now they have all the other benefits of GPS Insight for free – efficient dispatch, proof of delivery, proof of driver hours worked, reduction in speeding, theft recovery, and so on.

Click to learn more about our GPS Fleet Tracking System.

Rob.

Tags: cut costs gps tracking, Fleet Tracking, gps idling tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking save fuel, gps tracking saves money, Vehicle Tracking

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Apr 14 2010

Great Anti-Idling Commercial & Saving a Customer $10k a Month by Cutting Idling 75%

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Extreme Return on Investment,Fuel Savings,Humor,reduced idling,Reports — rdonat @ 3:45 pm

This is very to the point:

Our reports and proactive alerts help you to ensure your drivers are not idling.

It’s both wasteful and impacts our environment.

I pulled up a relatively new customer at random & ran an idling report for them & was happy to see that they CUT THEIR IDLING 75% WITH PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT!

Here is how I ran the report:

Run a GPS Insight Idle Time History Report

75% Reduction in idling percentage

The full report shows all the particulars & shows very clearly the effects of both using GPS Insight as well as managing the drivers to stop idling:

Decrease from 20% to 5% idling over 3 months

Note that this is only one of our thousand customers, and only 234 vehicles. I like the fact that GPS Insight truly is helping our customers make a big difference both in terms of saving fuel money, and the environment.

Plus they’re not pi$$ing on the planet anymore…

Click to learn more about our GPS Fleet Tracking System.

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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Jan 09 2010

New Routing Dashlet capabilities — save fuel by streamlining your drivers’ daily route!

Category: dashboard dashlets,Fuel Savings,Garmin Integration,New Features,Routing — rdonat @ 11:32 am

This feature really helps to make sure you are saving miles/hours/dollars by streamlining your drivers’ daily route!

Before I talk about this, please realize that the routing dashlet is not a standard feature, and is included with our routing package, which is an enhancement to the base GPS Insight product. You may not have access to it currently. Call your salesperson for information.

Here is a new ability we added to the Route dashlet:

You can enter multiple addresses as always, as well as a start/stop landmark.

GPS Insight routing dashlet

Click on Optimize to get the proper order (which you can cut and paste into an email to the driver, etc.):

Click on GPS Insight's "Map This" button for optimized directions

Here is the result:

Map and directions for optimized set of destinations

You can click on print, send (email), or link (to cut/paste a direct link) at the top right for your convenience.

We will add more functionality to this dashlet over time (e.g. more landmark/landmark group inclusion, optimization options, Garmin integration, etc.).

If you would like to try it out and you are not an existing routing customer, please call us for a 14 day trial.

To learn more visit our Fleet Tracking Routing.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

Comments (2)

Dec 10 2009

Which of your vehicles has been to the crack house?

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Fleet Tracking,Fuel Savings,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPSI-4000,Landmarks,Safety,Trimble — rdonat @ 2:50 pm

I used to use this as a far-fetched example when talking about the benefits of retroactive landmark reports:

“Let’s say you catch one of your drivers buying crack at a crack house — don’t you want to know which others may have visited there in the past year or more?”

Well, in Detroit, they actually found a city employee’s vehicle at an actual crack house.

It’s detailed in this Automotive Fleet article.

So, now that there is a real life example of this, how would you use GPS Insight to easily determine the other vehicles which have visited that same crack house?

Here’s how:

First, find the exact location by looking at that vehicle/date/time and create a landmark with the convenient link from that point (we’ll pretend my house is a crack house).

First, run a 3D history map for that day (pretend yesterday):

Use GPS Tracking to find out who's buying crack with your vehicles

I’ll pick the “crack stop” at my house (really me coming home from taking the kids to Buffalo Wild Wings, a different kind of crack) and blur the street names in case anyone wants to come see for themselves — then I click on “Landmark: Create from Point”:

Pick a stop & create a landmark around it

Now I choose a Polygon landmark, change the color to green (why not?), and outline the areas a vehicle might PARK IN (not my house, which is a common mistake — you want landmarks to be where people park, not where the actual landmark is!).

I call it “Crack House.”

Now when I refresh my menu to pick up the new landmark under “Reports: Landmarks” I can run a 1 month at a time landmark report (note clicking the month name selects the entire month):

Run a GPS Tracking landmark report on a crack house in GPS Insight

Other than my wife & I, no other vehicles show up in December, so I go to November and see that a few other vehicles have been tracked in that exact area. Note the “Passing through” option which is checked — this means the visit will show up even if the ignition is not turned off while there (e.g. a drive by drug buy — my guess is crackheads like to idle too).

There was too much activity for my vehicle (with 3-4 devices), my wife’s & the company Scion (3 devices), so I created an “all but robs” group and ran the report against that:

Quickly create a vehicle group in GPS Insight

So Elliot and Ryan were in the crack house zone in November:

Elliot & Ryan at the crack house?

You get the idea. Obviously this is just a simulation — Elliot was dropping off a credit card we had forgotten at a restaurant the night before, and Ryan was dropping my wife off after her car needed service.

But what is important here is GPS Insight allows you to go BACK in time to check for landmark activity.

Several competitors do NOT (including two of the largest/oldest ones in our space). They will only allow you to report on landmark activity in landmarks which you created BEFORE the activity took place.

That means you would need to know all the crack house locations in advance! I hope our customers don’t have that information handy.

Although, I’ve often said you would have to be smoking crack to go with another solution…

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, landmark reporting, unauthorized usage, using vehicles to buy crack, Vehicle Tracking

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Oct 31 2009

I’m guessing this is not authorized usage…

Category: California,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Driver Accountability,Fuel Savings,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 2:34 pm

Funny, we saw this truck on its way home from Disneyland. I think I’ll have a salesperson call to see how they keep tabs on unauthorized usage on Monday:

Unauthorized usage of Company Vehicles

GPS Insight prevents this! Not only will you prevent your drivers abusing/using their take home vehicles on weekends and at night, but you won’t have to worry about your drivers causing accidents when couches fall off of YOUR vehicles. Plus you won’t have to pay for the fuel to move their apartment.

Rob.

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