Determine how much fuel and C02 idling is actually costing you and the environment

We have a customer that really needed to precisely measure how much fuel and CO2 emissions their idling was costing them.

Not all vehicles are created equal, so at the individual vehicle level, we made the fuel type and estimated number of gallons consumed per hour idling something our customers can set.

Here’s how you get there:

There is a new option in vehicle admin called “Update fuel and emissions info”:

We have a “liters engine size to gallons idled per hour” converter which allows you to plug in your engine size and determine a fairly accurate number of gallons idled away per hour:

Here I am editing a SALES vehicle driven by KEVINJS:

Once you have overridden any defaults necessary (we default to unleaded and .4 gallons per hour spent idling), then you can run your report:

I ran it for the September for the Albuquerque group (ALB) which contains the newly changed 5.0 liter F-150 which burns .55 gallons per hour of diesel:

In this case, KEVINJS had roughly 7 hours and 3.863 gallons of idling, which we compute (based on the properties of the different types of fuels) to equate to .034 tons of emissions.

Together, the ALB group idled 512 hours, costing 209.6 gallons of fuel and 1.846 tons of CO2.

Now by using GPS Alerts, you can notify your drivers that they’re idling and ask them to shut down the vehicle with a text message or email (and since they’re idling and not actually driving, there are no distracted driving issues).

Then later on, you can easily determine your fuel and CO2 savings by running this or other idling reports available within GPS Insight.