If your business has vehicles on the move, you already know how difficult the fuel crisis has become. Diesel prices are volatile, margins are shrinking, and pressure is mounting. Fuel has always been a major operational cost, but today it’s a defining factor in fleet profitability — and even long-term viability.
But all is not lost. Fleet operators often underestimate just how much fuel is being wasted through everyday inefficiencies. Harsh driving habits, wasted miles from poor routing, or idling vehicles can quietly cost businesses thousands each year.
With modern telematics and real-time visibility, you can actually see exactly where fuel is being wasted, understand why it’s happening, and take practical steps to stop it.
Fuel costs in the UK and Ireland
Here is some perspective, with real numbers. Let’s say a typical HGV in the UK and Ireland covers around 40,000 miles a year, using roughly 18,000 litres of diesel.
At today’s prices — £1.697 per litre in the UK and around €2.07 per litre in Ireland following the recent excise reduction by the Irish government — that adds up to an annual fuel bill of roughly £30,500 or €37,300 per vehicle.
For a fleet of 50 HGVs, that’s a total yearly fuel cost of around £1.53 million or €1.87 million.
Even a modest 2% improvement in efficiency could save the fleet around £30,500 or €37,300 each year. And most estimates actually suggest that smarter driving behaviour can mean using up to 15% less fuel, saving up to £228,750 or €280,000 in annual savings.
As one of our refrigerated transport customers once said: “That’s significant — it would take a lot of hard work and a lot of pallets to make that money.”
Four ways your fleet can reduce fuel consumption
The causes of fuel waste are consistent across the industry. Fortunately, so are the solutions.
- Routing vehicles in the most efficient manner possible
- Driving at more efficient speeds (and avoiding truly excessive speeds)
- Avoiding harsh braking and acceleration as much as possible
- Reducing idling as much as possible
Smarter routing: the first step to lower fuel costs
The importance of efficient routing should be obvious. Vehicles moving backwards and forwards between jobs at random — or relying on a driver’s personal navigation — will cost you fuel and money. In 2026, there’s no excuse for this.
Telematics solutions such as Geotab enable automated, efficient routing and save you fuel as a result
The right system ensures every route and schedule is fully optimised and can even identify overlapping routes that could be simplified.
That includes the ability to change routes on the go as situations change, or identify which vehicle is best positioned to attend to a particular job at any moment in time.
Speed management: reducing excessive fuel burn
Encouraging drivers to stick to more efficient speeds can have a dramatic impact on fuel consumption. For example, the average HGV can use up to 40% more fuel when driven at 60 mph compared to 50 mph — and the higher the speed, the worse it gets.
Of course, there are times when higher speeds are necessary and legal. But in most cases, slowing down pays off.
Fortunately, solutions like CameraMatics can provide speeding alerts when drivers maintain speeds over thresholds set by the organisation, which in turn enables driver education to be focused on real-life events rather than abstract guidelines about ‘best practice’.
Limiting harsh braking, rapid acceleration and idling time
The exact same logic applies to harsh braking, rapid acceleration, and idling. Idling, for example, can consume more than a litre of fuel per hour. Let’s take a look at our numbers again:
1 litre/hour × 1 hour/day × 250 days × 50 vehicles = 12,500 litres/year
- Cost in UK: 12,500 × £1.697 ≈ £21,200
- Cost in Ireland: 12,500 × €2.07 ≈ €25,900
Both behaviours can — and should — be detected by your telematics solution. Fleet managers can use this data to identify drivers who need targeted, personalised coaching.
Beyond driving behaviour, a sudden drop in fuel efficiency for a particular vehicle may indicate maintenance is needed. Modern AI-powered telematics can even detect when maintenance is required by analysing these numbers.
In all cases, the key is awareness: collecting the right data and continuously monitoring common issues can reveal where your fleet is using more fuel than it needs to.
The bottom line: data turns fuel savings into real, measurable ROI
The recurring theme here is data. Gathering it, and analysing it, to ensure that your efforts to save fuel are targeted and effective.
And there’s no getting away from it, that means spending money on a sophisticated telematics system, and the time of a fleet manager to read that data and act upon it.
But even a serious telematics solution costs somewhere in the region of a dollar a day per vehicle, or 365 dollars a year. If you compare that to the numbers we looked at earlier, you’re looking at around 1% of the total fuel bill for a single vehicle. And that is before we think of all the other benefits that such a solution delivers.
With fuel prices becoming increasingly volatile, maximising operational efficiency is critical to protecting your margins and keeping your trucks on the road.
Talk to our team about how data-driven telematics can deliver immediate savings across your fleet.
