5 Physical Semi-Truck Upgrades to Improve Your Fleet’s Performance

The transportation industry is all about efficiency. Fuel efficiency. Time efficiency. Driver efficiency. Weight efficiency.

Naturally, improving your fleet’s performance makes your transportation company more efficient, which saves on costs and increases profitability.

Take a look at five physical semi-truck upgrades that can have a huge effect on your fleet’s overall performance.

1)   Focus on Safety

Safety should always be number one on the minds of your company leaders and drivers. Safe drivers are more efficient, deliver on time more often, and save your company on healthcare costs.

Having safety measures on your fleet vehicles can protect your drivers. Automated logs that count how many hours drivers have been on the road, dashboard cameras that show traffic movements, and automated warning signals can all improve driver safety and reduce accidents or claims that come from accidents.

2) Keep Up with Maintenance & Repairs

Maintaining trucks to keep them in prime condition makes them more efficient when it comes to fuel economy, mitigating expensive repairs, alleviating down time due to breakdowns, and reducing the possibilities of accidents due to mechanical failures.

Having automated maintenance schedules can catch a lot of issues before they become major hassles. Make sure your repair teams have a schedule in place to get vehicles in the repair shop on a regular basis to maintain your equipment in as new of a condition as possible.

3) Upgrade Older Equipment

Sometimes, you just need to retire older trucks and replace them with new ones. Semi-trucks have a lifespan of 15 years. But how long does it take before the cost of ownership becomes too much?

Make a concerted effort to upgrade your older equipment as it ages out of the fleet. Having a truck that continually gets worse gas mileage or has frequent breakdowns might not be worth the costs of repairing it.

4)  Manage Fuel Consumption

Even a savings of 0.1 mile per gallon across every truck you own can make your fleet save hundreds of thousands of dollars on fuel costs per year. Improve the weight of your trucks to make GWT lighter. Consider aerodynamic improvements, better tires, and regular maintenance as ways to save on fuel consumption.

Don’t be afraid to invest in trucks with automatic transmissions. Yes, there are more moving parts. Yes, they are more expensive. But the fuel savings and costs of ownership over the life of a truck make the investment worthwhile.

5)  Optimize Routes

Optimizing routes offers a way to manage fuel consumption by picking the most efficient ways to get from point A to point B. Taking back roads on certain routes may lessen the trip by 10 miles, but is the time-saving worth it if a truck can travel on an interstate with fewer starts and stops?

Fleet management software can help you optimize routes for your fleet. Better routes can improve fuel efficiency but also delivery times for your drivers, which makes them happier when loads are delivered on time or ahead of time. Customers also appreciate cost savings because it has the potential to lower their costs, too.

Talk to Vestige View to see how our fleet management and safety programs can help improve your fleet’s overall performance.