The first thing Declan Firth told me when I asked about his fuel spend was that he had watched it climb across three winters and never managed to explain it. He said he had gone through the drivers, the routes, and the loads over a period of months and found nothing that accounted for it. The operation is eight articulated HGVs based near Goole, containerised cargo between the Humber estuary and distribution sheds in West Yorkshire, and by his account, nothing about it had changed measurably across those three years. The fuel cards gave it away in the end. He and his operations coordinator sat with the card data for two weeks before they could trace the 11 to 13 percent overconsumption across the fleet to its sources. The idling at Ferrybridge was the largest piece of it. Hard acceleration on the A1(M) interchange runs came next, and then there were two drivers who had been taking loaded return legs through Knottingley on routes nobody had sanctioned, which Firth said he never did get a clear explanation for. He fitted trackers across the fleet in January 2024. By April, the numbers had come down to within a few percent of what the manufacturer specs listed for those vehicles. His own phrase for it was “unsurprising once you actually see the data.” From the way he described the months between fitting the trackers and the numbers falling, the conversations with the two Knottingley drivers were not straightforward. Fuel overconsumption on the M62 corridor runs higher than national averages for motorway freight, and the operators I spoke to along it pointed consistently to the road itself rather than anything they were doing wrong. The Liverpool to Hull run carries more sustained freight density than any route in England outside the M1 zone, and several fleet managers along it admitted they had underestimated for years how much the geography of the road was costing them in fuel. At the Warrington end, congestion around the Mersey crossing holds vehicles long enough that idling time on those sections runs well above any comparable motorway stretch, and experienced drivers have quiet workarounds through there that fleet managers said they had not known about until the tracking data surfaced them. The Pennine crossing near Saddleworth is entirely a gradient issue. Most of the routing software available to operators here could not model that gradient at all until fairly recently, and the drivers running those sections managed the descent by whatever felt right rather than by any data from the office. East of Leeds, the traffic drops off, but the concentration of distribution sheds picks up sharply around Castleford, Normanton, and Ferrybridge. Those sheds feed freight flows east toward Hull, Goole, and Immingham, three Humber ports that, between them, clear around 17 percent of UK seaborne trade. National Highways has listed the corridor as a logistics growth priority, and on most sections, the proportion of HGV traffic already runs above the national motorway average. Run the full length of it, and fuel will account for somewhere between 27 and 35 percent of total operating cost, depending on whose survey you trust. Sector cost figures for 2024 had HGV operating costs up 2.3 percent on the year, even with pump prices coming off their peak. Every operator I talked to along the route could tell me the idling cost off the top of their head, roughly a hundred pounds of diesel an hour for a stationary HGV that is going nowhere. Further along the corridor toward Widnes, a logistics coordinator running a refrigerated fleet told me her fuel spend fell 14 percent in the six months after she put telematics in. She said a good chunk of that was down to catching one driver whose fuel card patterns had been off for close to two years before anyone flagged it. She has about a dozen vehicles doing regular trunks between the Mersey basin and cold storage near Doncaster, and she said the route changes from the telematics were not where the savings sat. The savings came from what she described as the “embarrassment factor,” meaning the way drivers changed how they accelerated, braked, and managed their idle time once they knew it was all being logged and reviewed. Other coordinators along the corridor told me the same thing, all pointing to driver behaviour rather than routing as the larger source of fuel loss in fleets without monitoring. Route changes on their own usually come out at 5 to 10 percent in the figures I have seen. When behaviour monitoring goes onto a fleet that has never had it, the savings tend to push toward 15 or 20 percent, from what I have been shown. One of the telematics experts at trackingfox.com put the realistic first year figure for a mixed urban and motorway operation at 12 to 15 percent, with most of it arriving in the first three or four months before the numbers flattened. I have not found much in the general telematics reporting that takes gradient seriously as a fuel factor, despite what it does to consumption on roads like this section of the M62. A haulier who has run east to west trunker routes out of a Birkenhead freight yard for about sixteen years told me his old routing software did not model the Pennine gradient at all. Each of his drivers, he said, had a different method for the descent toward Huddersfield, and when I asked about speeds, he would not give numbers. The crossing near junction 22 adds 20 percent or more to fuel consumption on that section when a driver takes it badly, measured against what the same run would cost on flat ground. Once he had route scoring from the telematics, he changed the way he briefed drivers before the Pennine runs, particularly the ones newer to the road who had not yet built up the habits the longer serving drivers carried. On the Pennine sections alone, he got roughly 9 percent back, and he was the one who pointed out to me that for a single stretch of a much longer corridor, that figure sounded modest. His fleet does enough Pennine crossings in a year, though, that the total mounted up considerably faster than that per trip number suggested on its own. Several operators I talked to made the same point about management being the part that determines whether the telematics investment saves money, and more than one of them said the vendors had not been particularly clear about it. The sector’s published guidance on fleet telematics describes the technology as a diagnostic tool and says plainly that it only repays the investment when management acts on the data it produces. The Widnes coordinator told me her first reporting cycle made for “deeply uncomfortable reading” where two of her longer serving drivers were concerned, and the conversations that followed were not straightforward. From what I saw along this corridor, getting drivers to accept the monitoring was harder in operations where the workforce had been running the same roads for years and had fixed views about the best way to handle them. Firth is now running within about 3 percent of the manufacturer spec across the full corridor. He has been talking to his traffic manager about gradient aware routing on the Brighouse to Wakefield section, to see whether there is another point or two in it, though he has not decided whether the timetable cost of slower average speeds on that stretch is something he can live with. The post M62 Corridor Hauliers Are Taking 12 to 15 Percent Off Their Fuel Bills With Telematics appeared first on Egyptian Gazette.
