Article Summary
Truck fleets are reducing fuel costs through a combination of driver training, intelligent technology systems like AI-powered cruise control and telematics, and incentive programs that reward fuel-efficient driving habits. These strategies help drivers improve fuel economy by optimizing speed, reducing idling, and adapting driving techniques to terrain, potentially saving fleets thousands per vehicle annually.
- Driving at 65 mph instead of 75 mph uses roughly 27% less fuel on semi-trucks, making speed one of the top factors in fuel economy
- Heavy duty trucks idle an average of 2.3 hours per day, with new battery monitoring technology reducing unnecessary idling by up to 60% and saving approximately $4,000 annually per vehicle
- AI-powered telematics and coaching systems like Netradyne's GreenZone Score have helped early customers double their fuel economy improvements while reducing accidents
- Driver incentive programs and coaching encourage adoption of fuel-saving behaviors like smooth acceleration, reduced hard braking, and intelligent cruise control systems
- Advanced technologies like Traxen's iQ-Cruise use 3D maps, radars, and GPS data to calculate optimal speeds 3 to 5 miles in advance, helping average drivers achieve expert-level fuel efficiency
Birmingham, Alabama, is more mountainous than many people realize. From an airplane, it’s much more obvious but not as much when you’re on the roads. Back when I lived in the Iron City, there was one road I drove almost daily that started out flat from my destination but eventually turned into a steep climb that I would hate to cycle up because even my car struggled.
So, a little before I got to that portion of U.S. Highway 31, I would speed up to give my car a “run-and-go,” and it helped the old gal get about halfway up before it felt like she started to lose momentum.
This is what Royal Jones, founder of Mesilla Valley Transportation (MVT) (CCJ Top 250, No. 59), calls driving by the lay of the land.
“That's you acting like a roller coaster. It's slightly downhill, so roll out of that throttle and let it go. Let it go because there's no need for fuel,” he said. “Then as you approach a hill, it's actually smarter to go beyond the set speed … If you approach that hill with a little more speed, then it doesn't take so much power when you get in the heart of the hill.”
But Jones said some drivers get it, and some drivers don’t. Some understand how to “feel” the truck in varying terrains. Some of his drivers, he said, know how to get 11 mpg out of a 9-mpg tank.
Behind drivers, fuel is MVT’s biggest cost, Jones said, as is the case for most fleets. With diesel prices remaining near all-time highs because of ongoing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East that have severely bottlenecked the global fuel supply chain, fleets are searching for ways to mitigate fuel costs, and they’re turning to their drivers to make that a reality.
A driver’s role in fuel economy
That’s why Jones tested and later installed across his entire fleet Traxen’s iQ-Cruise, an intelligent cruise control system that replaces the factory-installed cruise control and controls the vehicle while it adjusts the speed based on surrounding elements.
The system uses radar on a truck and high-definition 3D maps to understand the truck’s surroundings, like steep grades and the radius and banks of curves, along with weather conditions provided via GPS connected to the cloud. Considering those details, it calculates vehicle and load weight and standard commands for power upon takeoff to determine the best speed for fuel economy up to 3 to 5 miles in advance along the driver’s path.
“This is a way to purchase a system that helps more people think the way I do and think the way some of my guys do that are out there trying to save fuel. We want to save fuel,” Jones said. “It helps Joe Average become Joe A-plus Student and get us better fuel miles,” and he rewards drivers who save on fuel costs.
80 tips to maximize fleet fuel efficiency
Melton Truck Lines also has a fuel bonus program.
Jac Carpenter, fuel conservation advisor at Melton, said the company carefully monitors fuel consumption by tracking monthly data for each truck, fleet and the company as a whole. Data is collected by “pinging” each truck’s engine control module every five minutes for accurate and timely information.
“We calculate miles per gallon (MPG) using the formula miles/gallons purchased = MPG, allowing us to assess performance at multiple levels,” he said.
He added that Melton monitors for the over-speed and idle percentage for each truck and holds drivers accountable to the company’s standards in those areas.
Speed is one of the top factors in fuel economy. According to the American Trucking Associations, operating a semi-truck at 75 mph uses roughly 27% more fuel than traveling at 65 mph. And drivers are directly responsible for speed, along with other habits that have an impact, such as hard braking and rapid acceleration.
Telematics provider Netradyne uses AI and machine learning to measure 100% of driving time and evaluate driving habits to create a GreenZone Score, which rewards proactive and defensive driving behavior.
The metric was initially used for safety but has been extended to fuel. The fuel scoring and coaching model integrates with the existing video safety platform to provide in-cab notifications with real-time coaching on fuel-saving behaviors. Additionally, drivers receive mobile app updates with their performance metrics, which share insights into how they can improve their behavior to achieve a projected score that could land them a fuel bonus.
[RELATED: How weigh station and toll bypass tech help fleets save on fuel costs]
Adam Kahn, chief business development officer at Netradyne, said some early customers implementing the fuel element have doubled their improvement in fuel economy.
“Our GreenZone Score has a direct correlation to accident reduction. So score goes up, accidents go down. What we also know is that an improvement in miles per gallon has an impact to the GreenZone Score,” Kahn said. “You reduce your speed … one of the byproducts is accident reduction or safety improvement. The other one—it’s just math and physics—is you have a natural increase in fuel efficiency.”
Giving drivers confidence to idle less
Another driver behavior that fleets know impacts fuel economy is idling. According to a Geotab study from March 2025 to February 2026, heavy-duty trucks across its 3 million connected devices idled an average of 2.3 hours per day.
“We can see from the data that idling is a top driver of fuel costs,” said Sabina Martin, vice president of product management at Geotab.
Geotab’s Sustainability Overview gives fleets visibility into their key performance metrics tied to fuel and emissions, pinpointing where inefficiencies exist among locations, vehicles and drivers. Martin said Geotab is working on adding a feature that distinguishes between productive and unproductive idling for greater insights and is also adding idling as a category to the Geotab Vitality driver incentive platform to encourage drivers to improve those metrics.
Driver safety platform Motive is also working to add a similar feature to its AI Coach, which provides automated coaching to drivers regarding safe and efficient driving habits.
“With the combination of telematics, plus the ambient temperature data, plus the GPS location data, we can now pinpoint through that intelligent idling detection feature exactly when we have unproductive idling, because sometimes drivers are sitting there for a good reason with their truck running, sometimes not,” like when they’re taking a smoke break, said Dinesh Coca, Motive’s director of product management.
Clarios Connected Services, a fleet battery management company, is also addressing the why behind idling but in a different way.
Clarios Director of Product Management Christina Yarnold said idling became a habit drivers developed out of necessity because they historically haven’t had visibility into the state of their battery.
“There was a propensity for drivers that were driving the heavy-duty fleets to leave their engine idling for fear that they might not have enough battery power, and they may not be able to restart their engine,” she said.
Clarios’ OEM-agnostic technology IdleLess, which was introduced in the U.S. just last year, monitors the state of a vehicle’s batteries and alerts the driver when they are running low so they can start the engine to recharge them if the auxiliary power unit has depleted their charge. It also alerts the driver when the batteries are replenished enough to power down their truck.
[RELATED: Navigating high fuel costs: Fleet platforms evolve to master route optimization]
Junior Barrett, global director of business development at Clarios, said it enables a balance between fleets saving money and the driver being comfortable.
Clarios uses an IoT gateway to gather information from the battery sensor installed on the battery in the vehicle. The battery data is sent to the cloud, where Clarios uses its algorithms to convert it into insights about the battery’s state of charge. That is then used to share alerts with drivers several ways, including API to a tablet or text message to a phone.
Yarnold said fleets have access to a dashboard that provides details from the IdleLess solution, as well as the company’s other battery solutions, including avoidable and unavoidable idling, CO2 emissions, and overall battery health to indicate when one needs to be replaced.
Clarios said the product can reduce unnecessary idling by 60%, leading to annual fuel cost savings of approximately $3,300 per vehicle. Now that diesel prices have increased, Barrett said that’s closer to around $4,000 annually.
