You negotiate every rate. You fight every rate cut. You chase every detention dollar. And then you let the single biggest controllable cost in your company ride up and down the interstate unmanaged, because it feels awkward to talk to a grown professional about how he drives. Most small fleets treat fuel like weather — something that happens to them. The fleets that survive sub-1% margin markets treat it like what it actually is: a coachable skill with a scoreboard.

The timing could not be more serious. The Department of Energy’s weekly diesel average sits at $5.348 a gallon as of August 3 — up $1.55 in a single year. Meanwhile, ATRI’s newest Operational Costs of Trucking report puts the average cost of running a truck at a record $2.336 per mile and truckload operating margins below 1%. In that math, fuel is not a line item. Fuel is the fight.

This lesson is not about buying anything — no aero kits, no APUs, no fuel cards. It is about the system ILG teaches fleets of one to ten trucks for coaching the person who controls more of your fuel bill than any piece of equipment on the truck: the driver. We call it the 1-MPG Project, and you can start it this week with a stack of fuel receipts and one honest conversation.

Your Biggest Controllable Cost Is Sitting in the Driver’s Seat

Run the number for your own truck. At today’s $5.348 average, a truck getting 6.5 miles per gallon burns about 82 cents of diesel every single mile — before a penny of truck payment, insurance, or driver pay. If you have not built your rate floor yet, our Three-Line Cost Book shows you where fuel sits inside your cost per mile. What it will show you is uncomfortable: fuel and the driver’s wage trade places as your top expense, and only one of them should ever be cut.

Here is the part almost nobody manages. NACFE’s executive director Mike Roeth has written that drivers can influence fuel economy by as much as 30%. Same truck, same trailer, same lane — the person holding the wheel can move the number by nearly a third. That is why the national fleet average has hovered near 6 mpg for years while NACFE’s Run on Less drivers, in well-specced but real-world trucks, averaged 10.1. The gap is partly equipment. It is mostly craft.

Now put dollars on it. A truck running 110,000 miles a year at 6.2 mpg burns 17,742 gallons. The same truck at 7.2 mpg burns 15,278. That single mile per gallon is 2,464 gallons — $13,178 a year at today’s price. Even half a point, from 6.2 to 6.7, is worth about $7,100 per truck per year. On a five-truck fleet, a company-wide half-point is a new employee’s salary that nobody had to haul a single extra load to earn.

The Three Behaviors That Actually Move the Number

Fuel coaching fails when it becomes a twelve-item lecture. The data says three behaviors do most of the work, so the 1-MPG Project coaches exactly those and ignores the rest. First is cruise speed: NACFE’s rule of thumb is that every mile per hour over 60 costs about a tenth of a mile per gallon. A driver who comes down from 68 to 63 just found half a point without touching anything else on this list. Second is idle time. Argonne National Laboratory estimates that more than one million long-haul trucks idle through their federally required rest periods every single day — hours of diesel burned while the truck earns nothing. Third is momentum: using cruise control, which can cut consumption up to 6%, keeping the engine in its sweet spot instead of lugging it — driving fast in too low a gear can consume about 45% more fuel than needed — and protecting following distance, because every brake application throws away fuel you already bought.

Notice what is not on the list: anything the driver cannot control. Headwinds, mountain lanes, 45,000-pound coils, winter blends — all real, none coachable. That is why the system you are about to build compares every driver to his own baseline on his own freight, never to the driver in the next truck.

The 1-MPG Project: Baseline, Two Behaviors, Board, Bonus

The 1-MPG Project is a 90-day system with four moves. Move one is the baseline. Tonight, pull the last 60 to 90 days of fuel data for each truck — fuel card statements, IFTA records, or a shoebox of receipts all work — and divide total miles by total gallons. That number, calculated per truck and per driver, is the only benchmark that matters. Write it down and date it. Do not clean it up, and do not compare trucks to each other; a reefer running the Rockies will never post a dry van’s Midwest number, and pretending otherwise kills the program’s credibility on day one.

Move two is picking exactly two behaviors per driver — for almost everyone, cruise speed and idle time. Two is not a compromise; it is the design. A driver can hold two commitments in his head at 5 a.m. in a dark truck stop. He cannot hold twelve. Move three is the board: every Friday, each driver gets one text with six numbers — miles, gallons, MPG this week, baseline, gallons saved, dollars saved. No app, no dashboard, no meeting. Move four is the bonus, and it is the engine of the whole project: half of every fuel dollar saved against baseline goes into the driver’s check, paid monthly. A driver running 9,000 miles a month who moves from 6.2 to 6.7 saves about 109 gallons — roughly $580 at today’s price. His half is about $290 a month, every month, for driving like the professional he already is. You keep the other $290 per truck and gave up nothing to get it.

The Kickoff Conversation

How you introduce this decides whether it lands as coaching or as surveillance. Do it face to face or on the phone, never by text, and lead with the money, not the monitoring. Here is the script ILG teaches, word for word:

Every sentence in that script is doing a job. The baseline is named so the target is concrete. The money is quantified so the driver hears opportunity instead of oversight. The two behaviors are stated so the ask is finite. The privacy promise — your number goes to you, not on a wall — protects the driver’s pride, which is the thing most fuel programs carelessly spend. And the closing question makes it an agreement, not an order.

The Friday Text and the Stuck-Number Conversation

The Friday text is the heartbeat of the project, and it takes four minutes per truck. If you already run the weekly one-on-one structure from our driver scorecard system, the MPG number simply becomes one more line in the Monday Fifteen. When a driver’s number jumps, say so out loud and pay the bonus visibly and on time — the first bonus check is the moment the program becomes real. When a number stays flat for three straight weeks, you owe the driver a conversation, and it must open with curiosity, not accusation:

Two rules protect the whole system. First, the scorecard is never a weapon: the day you use an MPG number in a discipline conversation is the day every driver starts managing the number instead of the truck. Second, the baseline breathes: recalculate it when the season changes, when the freight mix changes, and when a driver changes trucks. A fair baseline is the difference between a bonus program and a bitterness program. And remember that coaching is one blade of the scissors — the other is pricing the diesel you cannot save into your rates with a proper fuel surcharge schedule on every direct account.

This Week’s Assignment

Tonight, pull 60 to 90 days of fuel data and calculate a true MPG baseline for every truck you run — total miles divided by total gallons, written down and dated. Before Friday, have the kickoff conversation with one driver, using the script above with your own numbers in it. This Friday, send the first six-number text. That is the whole assignment: one baseline, one conversation, one text. Ninety days from now, that half-point you have been donating to the fuel island becomes a bonus your best driver brags about.

Bottom Line

At $5.35 diesel and sub-1% margins, fuel economy is the only five-figure number in your business you can move this quarter without buying a truck, winning a customer, or raising a rate. The 1-MPG Project moves it with four tools you already own: a baseline, two behaviors, a Friday text, and a promise to split the win with the person who earns it. Coach the right foot, pay the driver his half, and let the fuel island keep its donation this year.

Innovative Logistics Group