How Tracking Vehicle Movement Saves Your Company Money

If you have been managing a fleet of vehicles very long, you know that every minute a vehicle is on the road is costing money. So, how much are you spending on unauthorized vehicle use and on drivers who waste time and money to reduce work? Managing this cost alone by tracking vehicle movement could make you the company hero for the next year.

There are several ways to abuse the privilege of driving literally any kind of company vehicle:

- running errands on the way from the last business stop back to the garage

- using the truck for your weekend moving business

- using the company car to take your kids places on weekends

Each of these abuses of the privilege of driving a company vehicle can be detected by tracking vehicle movement. With a simple GPS tracking device that attaches to the steering column of each vehicle, you can not only know where each vehicle is at any moment (because you will be tracking vehicle movement), but you can also use the capability of tracking vehicle movement and save the history to prove where each vehicle has been and when it was there.

Consider the cost to the company if every vehicle is being driven an extra 100 miles per week. Assuming that your vehicles average 10 miles per gallon around town, each vehicle will use ten gallons of gas. If gas is selling for $2.75, each vehicle is costing the company an extra $27.50 per week. You can do the rest of the math to carry that out by the number of vehicles being used and then multiplying by 52 weeks. That comes to $1,430 per vehicle per year – and that’s just for gas!

By the time you add up the pro rated costs for everything else, you could be saving a bundle by tracking vehicle use. Take a few minutes to figure it out. Gather all of the costs on a ‘per vehicle’ and a per mile basis: fuel, oil, insurance, maintenance, parts, wear and tear, tires, license tags, taxes and the risks of having the vehicle on the road.

When you add up all of these costs for every vehicle that might be in use for something other than business, the amount could be staggering if it is widespread. But if you invested the small cost of tracking vehicle movement with a GPS tracking device, you could pay for the device and the monitoring service and still hand the boss a huge amount of money. If your fleet is like most, the cost of tracking vehicle activity with a GPS device would be recovered in just three months. In just ninety days you could expect to recover the cost of the device for tracking vehicle movement and the cost of a full year of monitoring.

Finally, consider that I’ve only asked you to think about the cost of unauthorized use of company vehicles and the cost savings you could achieve by tracking vehicle use. Now think about the money you could save if you could prove that some of your drivers were intentionally taking longer routes from one place to the next, or that by tracking vehicle movement you could prove that some of your drivers are sitting somewhere killing time. The more you think about the value of tracking vehicle movement, the greater the potential savings you can achieve for your company.

For more information about the benefits of tracking vehicle behavior, get the free report, “7 Ways Your Company Can Save Thousands of Dollars With GPS Fleet Tracking.”  Many companies have substantially increased their revenue and lowered their costs by installing a GPS tracking system for their fleet. To calculate the ROI for your company, see the GPS vehicle ROI calculator.