Idling

Idling is running a vehicle’s engine while the vehicle is not moving: queueing at a site gate, waiting at a batching plant, or keeping the cab cool. It burns fuel and engine hours while earning nothing, which is why idle time is one of the first numbers a fleet should extract from its tracking feed.

How much fuel does idling burn?

The most-cited public benchmark is from the US Department of Energy and Argonne National Laboratory, and it is US data, not a GCC measurement: “Idling a heavy-duty truck consumes about 0.8 gallon of fuel per hour,” roughly 3.0 litres per hour by our conversion, within a published range of 0.6 to 1.5 gallons per hour across vehicle types (US DOE/Argonne, 2015). The same fact sheet notes that many fleets have reported significantly reduced idling with telematics/GPS systems, because idling only falls once it is measured per vehicle.

A GCC construction fleet’s duty cycle differs from US long-haul rest-period idling, so treat these figures as an order-of-magnitude benchmark. Fleetric computes idle minutes per vehicle from the mandated tracking feed a fleet already runs and prices them at the current month’s fuel setting; see the fuel cost article and the fuel price tracker.