Of course it is! But the reality is we cannot change physics or overcome mechanical thermal inefficiencies with chemistry. Sadly. We would love to tell you we can, but that would be dishonest.

If your vehicles drive a lot of open road mileage, that is ideal food for Fuelre4m – we will happily dish you up great fuel savings.

When your vehicles do combined cycle driving between urban and open road, Fuelre4m will still happily give you excellent fuel savings.

On the opposite end of the scale, based on exhaustive testing done over the last nearly 2 years now, one area where the physics of thermal inefficiency rules over chemistry magic in the fuel is urban delivery vehicles or either parcels or especially food delivery with high idling times.

Idling consumption is measured in litres per hour, your driving consumption is measured in kilometres per litre or miles per gallon. When an urban delivery vehicle idles for 1 hour, depending on the size of that vehicle, it will consume between 1.3 to 3liters of fuel per hour and not travel a single kilometre.

Most companies never consider this impact and they do not extract idling data and fuel consumption for their fleet – it remains a hidden black box as it is an unavoidable cost of doing business and deliveries. Or so they think. Unless you analyse it and understand it, you won’t realise the financial impact on your business and how to ensure it is properly managed. Very few fleet managers track idling because it complicates the analysis for them.

Case Study:

Assume that vehicle drives for 300km doing deliveries and idles for 2 hours during the deliveries consuming 1.8lt per hour during idling and with fuel economy during driving of 3.5km per hour. The blended consumption is 3.36km/lt, a reduction of 4%.

Now shorten that same route by 50% to 150km daily, instead of 300km, and your blended consumption now decreases by 7.7% over open road consumption to 3.23km/lt.

Now change the number of deliveries done daily to double, but a 50% improvement in productivity (more pressure on the driver so he delivers a little quicker with less chatting along the way) so the idle time only increases by 50% to 3 hours.

Now your blended fuel consumption increases by 12.5% over your pure driving consumption, with your fuel economy now down to 3.11%.

The overall impact on your vehicle now is that:

1. Your average speed was 300km/(8 hour shift less 2 hours idling= 6 hours driving) = 50km/hour with fuel consumption being
   1. 1.8lt/hour for idling = 3.6lt per day and
   2. 3.5km/lt yielding 28.5lt/100km fuel economy
   3. 3.36km/lt blended consumption yielding 29.8lt/100km fuel economy.
2. Assuming that you have now increased your number of daily drops, so your business is more efficient, you now have to have 2 vehicles to cover the 300km route, each doing 150km of the route, and each idling for 3 hours instead of 2 hours. Your business becomes more capital intensive  – needs more assets and requires more Opex as you need an additional driver. For each vehicle itself your statistics now look as follows. Average speed was now only 150km/(8 hour shift less 3 hours idling = 5 hours driving = 30km/hour with fuel consumption changing as follows:
   1. 1.8lt/hour for idling x 3 hours = 5.4lt per day and
   2. 3.5km/lt yielding28.5lt/100km driving economy (this will increase as the driver will be doing more start/stopping and more acceleration from stop, but to keep the analysis simple we will keep it constant)
   3. 3.11 km/lt blended consumption yielding 32.15lt/100km.

Given the low speeds achieved between deliveries, the average number of gear changes and acceleration increases significantly, the average engine temperature never reaches the optimal design temperature for maximum engine efficiency, the high idling means the cooler engine temperature and low compression decreases the sealing efficiency of the pistons in the chamber allowing unburnt fuel to be pushed down to the oil sump during idling. This means the vehicle needs more frequent oil changes are essential to keep the viscosity levels of the oil correct and keep the engine properly lubricated to prevent damage to the engine.

Can Fuelre4m still operate efficiently under these conditions to help our clients achieve fuel savings? Sadly, the answer is “No”. With the reduced thermal efficiency of the engine under these conditions nothing can improve fuel efficiency short of an electric vehicle. Once idling per shift exceeds 2 hours per day, the probability of obtaining improved fuel consumption decreases exponentially. Below is a graph of data for one of our clients taken over a month comparing their fuel consumption with idling times. You will note the approximate cut over point is between 3 to 3.5 hours.

If you have any questions of comments, please feel free to send us a note to info@fuelre4m.com