Is the price of fuel causing people to slow down?

Depends on how many miles a year you drive. .1 mpg wont make a diffrence on your check. Over 160k miles at $6 a gallon. Well thats an extra 10k a year. 10k is not a small amount of cash.

 

How many loads a year does a guy lose to gain that .1? Or .5?

10k$ might equal 2 or 3 loads missed over a two week period.

 

Im going to assume you want an honest detailed answer here. So here goes. It just depends on the driver and the route, first to be clear. My .1mpg example was more a quick conversation point replying to ddh on it not showing on your paycheck then a true endorsment for saving fuel. But lets roll with it. Assumeing that every load you do is 100% of the time, timed out so you use every single second of every single day.

Yea your likely going to lose money. But reality is its not a binary. Loads take a while to load. Shippers have hours of operation. Morons take a nap in the fuel lines. Shippers take all #### day to unload 1 pallet. People cause wrecks. Realisticly you cant make the argument that finding your rigs sweet spot for mpg is going to lose you loads anymore then i can argue that being slow all the time is the right call because every single one of those 160k miles will be counted realisiticly.

Also unless your speeding, say by being one of the ######## doing 75-80 in a 65 or 70 and blasting through workzones without slowing at all. Slowing from 70 to 68 or even 65 is going to cost you what? 15-20 mins in real world conditions? Even if your on a snowflake route or light enough that you literally never slow down for backups. Congalines of trucks. Construction, Hills, swift taking 30 miles at 65 to pass amazon at .001mph. You save at most an hour? Maybe?

And congrats you showed up and your shipper is closed so your waiting at the truckstop next door till 7am. Or amazon causeing that 2 hour pileup just made you miss your apointment so you gotta come back tomorrow. Mayne you deliver and still need to wait till tomorrow to reload. Welp guess all that extra fuel was reaaaaaly worth it to hurry up and wait. Sure someone doing 60 in a 70 or 75 is a moron and a traffic impediment. But so is the ####### doing 75 in a 65.

Meanwhile if you CAN put some cash back in your pocket. Why would you not? Obviously if your going to miss a reload or an apointment going slower, then it makes no sense and you should push it though id argue that if your time managment is that piss poor you need to reevaluate how you spend your time or book loads since most reasonable folks build delays into their schedules. But saying going slower to save fuel is going to cost you loads is disingenuous at best. Pointing out that when it makes sense slowing down to save fuel adds up? Less so.

 

Very good points here. 100 percent agree. Unless every shipper and receiver is 24/7, there will never be a benefit to driving faster..in fact, it's probably more incentive to take your time. In the dry van or reefer world, not many places take you early so might as well save the fuel. A 650 mile run is an all day drive governed or not.

 

Did you mean 1 mile per gallon or .1 mile per gallon? Because .1 will be about $3k a year if you pay $6 for fuel the entire 160k miles. The cheaper fuel gets the smaller the spread.

 

Yeaaaaa i just double checked that and your 100% correct that I totally screwed up the math. That was a toilet post if you catch my meaning. I was rushing and did 160K X .1 = 1600X$6.5 =10400 because it sounded right in my head.

Rather then 160K / 5.6 = 28,572 (rounded up) 160K / 5.7 = 28,070 (rounded down) so 502 gallons X 6.5 = 3263. My mistake there lol. Remimber kiddys always double check your math! It makes ya look dumb if you dont herp derp.

Point of the post stands however. If you can slow down a little bit and save money....why wouldnt you?

For me it doesn't matter much. I haul 80K+ so im usually moving pretty slow anyway since every molehill is a small mountain with a 475 and 3.52s at 85k+. And the fuel diffrence between 80k and 85500 or even 90k is so minimal that i stopped bothering to track it (like literally less then .01MPG over 100k miles) and slowing down even more doesnt help my MPG like at all.

.....Though moving at over about 68 it drops like a rock. If i get to 70 it goes down by about .25, if i somehow get to 75 it goes down by about 1.7 mpg. Havent had the balls to get 85500 to 80mph for fear of tires blowing from heat. They get REALLLLY toasty at 75 as is. Frankly a blown tire or worse 2 is going to pretty much wipe out any financial savings of going fast AND #### up my time table besides. And god help me if i ever needed to go from 80 to stopped with that much weight in a hurry. Not worth it. Well that and 17k RPM on a 700k mile 27k hour ISX15 makes my butthole clench so hard my underpants, pants and seat turns to diamond from the the pressure.

 

On the backroads it's the fancy Denalis and Platinum pickups riding my ### and blowing by on double yellows. The old men that I used to see poking along at 45 aren't even on the road today. So, I guess the K-shaped economy is still at work.

 

I'm thinking we're trucking in two entirely different ways.

Do what works for you

 

Respectfully both of you guys I have read over the years .
intelligently, reaching a different conclusion . Is part of the American dream . Neither one of you are going and taking a shower on the fuel island . Nor washing your feet in the windshield washer bin . Keep on keeping on

 

For me it all depends, if I have the time, know I have the time I generally am a slow poke. If I need the time I gain it on my drive, if slowing down is gonna cost me a chance to get unloaded that day it ain't happening. Generally pulling flat speed has little to do with fuel mileage for me, if I am pulling vans it makes a huge difference, it is over 1mpg to slow from my normal cruise speed of around 70 to drop down to around 62, so if I am pulling vans I generally try and keep it slow. Now on the flip side if I am heading home, I pretty much move as fast as I can fuel mileage ain't on my mind.