Your trucks are more than pieces of equipment – they’re the lifeblood of your business. Proper, consistent maintenance is a must if you’re going to keep the fleet in top shape, and the best way to do that is with a fleet service mechanic.
Going with an outside provider for regular fleet maintenance has amazing benefits. It can save your company money, boost productivity, and give you expert insight from an outsider’s perspective.
Fuel is one of, if not the largest operating expense in trucking. The amount of fuel varies per truck, but a semi-truck can hold between 800 and 1000 litres of diesel. This fuel is pumped into dual tanks that sit on either side of the tractor, giving them the name “saddle tanks.” They make sure that the weight of the amount of fuel is balanced.
If the average is roughly three kilometres per litre, it will be 3,000 kilometres before refuelling is necessary. But when you’re driving 60 hours a week over seven days, that can be a lot of refuelling. If we use an average diesel fuel price of $1.20 (the average at the time of writing), this means that it can cost more than $1200 to fuel up just once. For a large fleet, this is tens of thousands of dollars per month, so who is paying at the pump?
Trucking is the lifeblood of many Canadian industries, as just about every major store relies on it to receive new goods from distributors. The reliance on transport trucks is only going to increase, and this means that truck drivers are in big demand in Canada.
The catch? There aren’t enough new drivers joining the fleets. Unless major changes are made soon, the industry will be facing a severe driver shortage that could impact every major industry in our country.
What does the future hold for the trucking industry? It’s not hard for us to slip into daydreams about what the next few decades will look like. Will our team soon be interacting with a computer system alone on the side of the road instead of a driver? Or will trucking stay as it has for the past half-century? There are many trends we have to watch very closely if we want to make accurate predictions for the future!