GPS Insight Blog » reduced idling

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

Feel free to contact us if you are interested in seeing a more in-depth demonstration of our GPS fleet tracking solution.

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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Dec 18 2010

Use it or lose it! (ROI that is…)

Category: Alerts,Driver Accountability,Extreme Return on Investment,Identifying and eliminating speeding,reduced idling,Scheduled Reports — rdonat @ 2:38 pm

I was looking at one of our customers’ accounts the other day. They have 23 vehicles. Many people with that many vehicles think they “have a handle” on what’s going on.

I was thrilled to see that this company was using GPS Insight to see what was going on with their fleet.

Specifically, they were using our:

Alerts
Scheduled Reports

I call these 2 features “Unattended ROI” since you don’t have to do anything except let US monitor your fleet for exceptional situations and alert you to them, as well as run a summary report automatically and look at it in your inbox in the morning.

Scheduling Reports to alert to exceptions

You can see there are landmark, idling, speeding, and “long stop” alerts set up here. This customer wants to know every time a vehicle gets to the office “late” which is between 6 PM and 5 AM. That can be used to identify people working late as well as people sneaking into the office when it is not manned in order to load up on parts for side jobs.

We have checked this for them 728,641 times since they set up that alert. We’ve alerted them only 820 times (which is typical — usually 1 in 1000 alert checks results in an alert).

They have also set up a number of scheduled reports:

Scheduling fleet tracking reports to automate your job

Just by setting up these 8, we have sent them 1300 reports and all they have to do is read them in their email every day. They come as .html, Excel/CSV, and associated maps (for speeding, idling, and odd-hours violations).

I wish all our customers (and users of GPS Tracking in general) were this diligent about setting up MEANINGFUL alerts and reports. It drives significant ROI knowing in real time what is going on with your fleet. If you don’t use them, you are throwing away this return on your investment.

Use it or Lose it!

Rob.

Tags: Alerts, Extreme Return on Investment, fleet tracking devices, GPS Tracking, scheduled reports, vehicle tracking software

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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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Aug 14 2010

GPS Insight has sent out over two million alerts based on driver behavior!

Category: Alerts,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Extreme Return on Investment,Identifying and eliminating speeding,reduced idling — rdonat @ 5:06 pm

We recently (sometime Friday) sent our 2,000,000th alert.

This is after checking 1.742 BILLION times for our customers over the years.

Email I receive nightly which shows how many alerts have been processed

Really, the majority of those checks have taken place over the past year or so, since we started making the power of our alerts more known to customers.

Since you can create an alert and let us do the heavy lifting, every minute of every day, this provides what I call “Unattended ROI.”

Remember that with GPS Insight, you can send alerts straight to the drivers themselves, as well as to supervisors.

So if a driver speeds, idles too long, stops too long somewhere he/she shouldn’t be, is using the vehicle off-hours, or out of where they should be (or doing several other things we can monitor with alerts), THAT DRIVER WILL RECEIVE AN INSTANT ALERT PROMPTING THEM TO CORRECT THEIR BEHAVIOR!

This is useful since GPS Insight becomes “the bad guy.” You don’t necessarily need to talk to your drivers yourself — we are the “anonymous” reminder which helps them to know they need to correct their behavior, whether it’s speeding, idling, or not being where they’re supposed to be.

We have sent out Two Million Alerts so far — if you haven’t already set yours up, do so! They’re part of the basic GPS Insight package & unlimited, unlike many competitors’ alerts.

Plus, you can “combine” our alerts to ensure you don’t get false alerts.

Good examples include:

Sending idling alerts only during business hours and only when the vehicle is outside the maintenance yards, to avoid pestering the driver if work is being performed on the vehicle
Sending a driver a “what is the holdup?” email/SMS text message whenever they stop for more than 30 minutes at a supplier
Sending a driver a “is your vehicle being stolen?” alert if it moves late at night and leaves the driver’s home, to avoid waking him up if the spouse needed to move it in from the street or out of the way
Sending Speeding alerts based on lower thresholds only during night time hours

Alerts are one of the best tools for saving money using GPS Insight. We’re glad we’ve processed almost two billion of them, and have sent over two million out so far!

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Alerts, Extreme Return on Investment, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, two millionth alert

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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

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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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Jul 01 2009

Gas prices are rising — get on top of your fleet now!

Category: Alerts,Extreme Return on Investment,Fuel Savings,reduced idling — rdonat @ 9:43 am

I saw this graph today in an Automotive Fleet email newsletter:

When fuel spiked last year, GPS Insight helped our customers save fuel by curbing idling, reducing speeding, ensuring the most appropriate vehicle was sent to a job, and that the efficient routes were taken.

Here is an article about how we saved a customer $100,000 EACH MONTH in fuel during the Summer when fuel prices were at $5 per gallon of diesel. Then the snowball effect saved them literally millions throughout the year.

Here is another article about how we send alerts to your drivers themselves telling them to stop wasteful behaviors.

Get GPS Insight in your vehicles and get control of your fleet. There are so many benefits, you will not regret the decision. Start with a unit or two to and see what kind of insight you will gain into your fleet. Call one of our reps at 866-477-4321 (1 for sales) and find out how we can help.

You can be up and running within 1-3 days with GPS Insight. Really!

[or you can buy a 1/2 gallon of gas with the money you don't spend on the product, per day -- that will go down to 1/3 gallon shortly]

Thanks,

Rob.

Comments (2)

May 23 2009

Consolidating GPS drift points

Category: Arizona,GPS INSIGHT ADVANTAGES,Mapping,reduced idling — rdonat @ 8:40 pm

GPS is very accurate, but still not 100%, especially for civilian/commercial purposes.

Typically, when a vehicle is moving, we get it within 5 feet of accuracy.

When a vehicle sits still for some time, tracking devices (all of them) typically experience “GPS Drift” of up to 25 feet or so.

However, GPS Insight fixes and insulates our customers from this inaccuracy and I will show you how in this article:

This is what GPS Drift it looks like using a version of our mapping which only our support staff has access to — this particular map shows how long each individual point takes to make it into our database, and also shows every single reported point, and I use it make this “GPS drift” evident:

These are roughly 24 points which bounce around up to 25 feet from the center (they are 30 second updates for 12 minutes while my wife & family waited for me to get a few things from the office on our way home tonight):

All of these points were in our database within 4 seconds of them being registered by the GPS device (in this case, a GPSI-4000 at 30 second updates).

However, we “consolidate” them into a single, highly accurate 12 minute idle stop, which shows precisely where we parked the vehicle and let it run for 12 minutes — the parking lot is practically empty and we parked in the 2nd space:

To show what our customers see, I run a typical 3D history map to compare:

And we only see one “pin” where my vehicle truly parked for 12 minutes:

Note the “lighter/thinner” red line from earlier in the day (where I drove through the ATM at the bank to our North earlier). We show activity in this way to help easily determine direction and time of travel with the “path” which exists below the individual location “pins” which we show.

Here I have zoomed out a bit, and we see this 2 minute idle stop (at the ATM drive through), 5 1/2 hours prior to coming back to that area (it’s a long drive to Tortilla Flat):

The light/thin to dark/thick lines are another way we help customers gain easy insight into their fleet activity.

Here is my vehicle (Rob 4000) and Brent’s — it is immediately apparent by looking at the line thickness/color what direction of travel I took to the office, then back home (by way of the post office) today. It is trivial to see that Brent drove in the direction of travel from light/thin to darker/thicker.

These are the types of things which you might not immediately notice with GPS Insight. Things just “work” the way they should. But behind the scenes, we are processing and filtering and consolidating and sanity checking millions of points per day for our customers to make sure they see sensible data and can use that to bring efficiency and insight to their businesses. We take advice on usability from customers all the time, and encourage them to provide feedback to help better the product.

I just happened to run a map tonight for a different reason (we were testing a different unit) and I noticed this idling activity. I thought it would be a good time to detail how we do these two (of many) convenient map enhancements for our customers.

By the way, here is an iPhone pic of where we were at with the kids (‘Tortilla Flat’ — an old mining town/tourist trap in Apache Junction):

It is a beautiful area near the Superstition Mountains — we thought the drive would be nice on this Memorial Day weekend. I’ve had better food before though…

Note the hitching post where people tie their horses up when they can eat at the Saloon.

We don’t have GPS or diagnostics for horses, and note they left different types of “emissions.”

Rob.

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