Fuel

Fuel is measured by most fleets from card statements, which tells you what was bought and nothing about what was used.

What the vehicle can report

Consumption calculated by the engine, per journey, on CAN-connected vehicles.

Fuel level, which shows a drop that did not correspond to driving.

Idle time, which consumes fuel and produces nothing.

Distance, to pair with volume.

Together these produce actual consumption per vehicle, which card data alone cannot.

The reconciliation that finds things

Litres purchased on the card against litres consumed by the vehicle, per period.

A persistent gap at one vehicle is either a leak, a metering fault, or fuel going somewhere else.

A gap across a site points at a card being used for something other than that fleet.

Most fleets never run this because the two datasets live in different systems, which is the join problem in its own right.

Idling

The largest single recoverable fuel cost in urban fleets, and the easiest to measure.

A vehicle idling to run a tail lift or a chiller is working; one idling in a layby is not.

Which means idle time needs context before it becomes a target — and a crude idle reduction campaign produces drivers switching off equipment they need.

Measure by site and by round first, because the pattern is usually structural: a depot with a long wait, a customer with no loading bay.

What moves consumption

Load and route, far more than driving style.

Tyre pressure, which is cheap to fix and invisible without monitoring.

Maintenance condition, particularly filters and injectors — a vehicle with a fault code frequently uses more.

Driving style, which is real and is the smallest of the four despite being what most products lead with.

Setting a baseline

Consumption per vehicle, normalised for load and round, over a quarter.

Compare like vehicles on like work, not a fleet average which mixes van sizes and route types.

The outliers are where the money is, and they are usually a fault rather than a person.

The measure

Actual consumption against a comparable baseline, per vehicle.

Card-to-vehicle reconciliation gap.

Idle proportion, by site.

All three from data you either have or can get, and none requires anyone to be monitored.

Investigate the vehicle before the driver

The order that is right more often.

A consumption outlier is a fault, a tyre, a filter or an injector far more frequently than it is a person.

Check the codes, the tyre pressures and the service history first.

Starting with the driver finds the mechanical cause late, expensively, and having damaged a relationship that the rest of the deployment depends on.

Follow the difficult record

Use online timesheets for labour-cost records to frame one representative case. The useful evidence is the record created when a value is corrected, approved and exported.

Independent reference

For a thematic point of reference, see the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Use this established source as an outside check before turning the principle into a system rule.