Idle time is the largest recoverable cost in most fleets and the least visible, because nothing breaks and nobody reports it. Put your own numbers in.
Change any input and the result updates. Nothing is emailed anywhere and nothing is stored.
Formula: vehicles × idle hours × litres per hour × working days × 12 × fuel price. Defaults are a mid-size commercial fleet; change every one of them to yours.
Idle fuel burn depends on engine size and whether air conditioning is running. A light van typically sits at the lower end of 1 to 2 litres per hour, a loaded truck at 2 to 4, and a truck idling with the cab air conditioning working hard in a Gulf summer can exceed that. The 2.5 litres per hour default is a reasonable midpoint for mixed commercial fleets; if you have CAN data, use your own figure instead, because it will be better than any estimate we can offer.
Idle hours per vehicle per day is the number most fleets are wrong about, almost always downward. Before measuring, operators typically guess thirty to forty minutes. Measured, the figure is frequently double that once loading bays, waiting at gates, breaks and shift handovers are counted. The default here is deliberately conservative at ninety minutes.
A 30% reduction is achievable and defensible. Eliminating idling entirely is not, and any vendor promising it is ignoring the fact that some idling is legitimate — hydraulic equipment, refrigeration, cab cooling at 45°C, and engines that genuinely should not be cycled on and off repeatedly.
The reductions that hold come from measurement plus coaching, not from a threshold alone. Drivers respond to seeing their own numbers alongside their peers far more reliably than to a policy memo. What the system contributes is making the invisible visible — see driver behaviour monitoring for how scoring should be structured so drivers accept it.
An idling programme imported unmodified from a European fleet will fail here, because it will flag every driver who keeps a cab habitable in summer. That is not misconduct and treating it as such destroys the credibility of the whole programme in a week. Separate ambient-driven idling from waste, or raise the threshold to something defensible — and if the underlying goal is fuel reduction, cab cooling equipment addresses it better than a score ever will.
If the annual figure above is material, it is usually the fastest-paying part of a telematics deployment. Talk through your numbers with us or message us on WhatsApp — we will tell you what is realistically recoverable on a fleet your size.
Roughly 1 to 2 litres an hour for a light van, 2 to 4 for a loaded truck, and more when cab air conditioning is working against Gulf summer temperatures. Engine size and load matter more than brand. If your vehicles report CAN data you have the real figure already — use it rather than an estimate.
Yes, with measurement and coaching. Eliminating idling is not, because some of it is legitimate — refrigeration, hydraulics, cab cooling, and engines that should not be cycled repeatedly. Fleets that target a sensible reduction and coach toward it hold the gain; fleets that demand zero get gaming and resentment.
Because the intuitive estimate only counts obvious waiting. Measured idle time includes loading bays, gate queues, breaks taken with the engine running, and shift handovers. Most operators guess thirty to forty minutes and measure closer to ninety. That gap is the opportunity.
No, deliberately — it prices fuel only, because fuel is the figure you can defend in a budget conversation. Idling also accrues engine hours, which pulls service intervals forward and depresses resale value. Both are real and both make the true cost higher than the number above.
Not necessarily. Ignition state plus zero speed gives you idle time on any basic tracker. Measuring the fuel burned during it rather than estimating from a rate needs CAN data or a fuel probe — see fuel monitoring for when that is worth fitting.
Send us what you put in. We will tell you where the assumptions are optimistic, including when that argues against buying from us.
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