Dear DfBB

Got a fleet-related question or something on your mind? Let the team at Driving for Better Business know and it will (hopefully) make all your worries go away!

Dear DfBB, With the cost of everything, but especially fuel, rising rapidly, how can I encourage drivers to support our push for greater efficiency?

DfBB says: Running fleets can be an expensive business. While poor driving can obviously put your drivers and other road users at risk, it can also cost your organisation huge amounts of money, but often in ways you may not realise.

The most obvious cost is insurance, which is often one of the biggest operational costs. We’ve seen plenty of wellmanaged fleets paying annual premiums of between £500-£750 a vehicle for insurance, depending on the type of journey and level of mileage. However, a firm with a poor claims history and poor driver management systems can easily pay three or four times that amount. Unnecessarily high fleet insurance premiums are usually a result of poor or non-existent systems for managing drivers and vehicles.

An associated cost is uninsured repairs arising from unnecessary vehicle damage. Repairs to scraped bodywork or damaged wing mirrors may just get added to the routine maintenance bill. But they should be highlighted as the exceptional damage repair costs they are, directly linked to driver management.

Drivers can easily use 50% more fuel, go through tyres twice as quickly and cause routine servicing and maintenance costs to balloon out of control. This excess of unnecessary cost can be tied back directly to how drivers and vehicles are managed. However, all too often they are simply dismissed as ‘the cost of doing business’ and opportunities to improve fleet efficiency is missed.

“Sharing costs and proposed reduction targets can make a difference with drivers”

It’s important to have a solid baseline for measuring the various costs in the business. That means analysing collision numbers and associated damage repair costs for each vehicle. Those costs should then be collated with SMR and insurance costs and the average MPG per vehicle.

Sharing costs and proposed reduction targets with drivers can make a difference. They could be thinking about pay rises themselves to help manage their own cost of living so it may be useful to explain that the company is undergoing its own ‘cost of living’ or ‘cost of driving’ crisis.

It’s easy to think that your drivers are responsible for all these excess costs, but the environment they’re working in may also be a factor. They may be driving overaggressively, but that could be to unreasonable workload. Accelerating and braking more harshly, speeding and driving too close to other vehicles could be the only way they think they can keep up with their schedule.

Monitoring data is key. Fleets that use telematics systems in their vans, for instance, are able to identify exactly how these costs are impacted by driving style. Harsh driving naturally results in greater wear and tear on the vehicle and this can be identified quite easily and work can be done to manage the drivers more effectively. The biggest cost-saving here is fuel. With experts predicting further increases, anything you can do to reduce fuel use will deliver a financial benefit.

With costs rising across the board, driver pay rises may be out of the question, but managing data properly and quantifying financial benefits of achieving targets will help. Share the reasons for requiring improvement, share the targets, and share the rewards. That way you’ll have more chance of getting your drivers on board.

Got a fleet-related issue and want some advice? Email support@drivingforbetterbusiness.com