Vehicle fleet managers tell us they have plenty of data available to them, but it’s interpreting the data that’s a constant struggle. This includes determining things like, What measurements affect the likelihood of a slow leak or a puncture or decreased mileage? Understanding and optimizing the miles of data is a challenge for fleet managers.

We’ve analyzed data from 375 billion tire rotations and from over 200 million tire miles. Our analysis has revealed insights that truck fleets of all sizes are finding useful for cost savings and safety improvements.

Let’s look at some of the insights we’ve uncovered and how you can use them to optimize your fleet.

Pressure Points

Fuel Efficiency + Pressure:

Boost the fuel efficiency of your fleet by increasing cold pounds per square inch (PSI) in tires. We analyzed a fleet with twenty vehicles over three months. We saw an almost 10% miles per gallon (MPG) improvement when the cold PSI was increased by 17.5% (based on an average 8 MPG for the fleet). Conversely, an extra 300 gallons were added to fuel consumption when driving 62,000 miles at 8% below the recommended pressure.

High Temperature + Pressure:

Keeping your tires well-inflated is important for three reasons: it is safer, makes tires last longer, and reduces downtime. In delivery service fleets (or DSPs), the front and back tires need different amounts of air because the rear axle carries more weight. When these recommendations are not followed or are misunderstood, tires may not be inflated correctly after a tire rotation. If tires are not inflated properly (like below 80% of the recommended pressure), they wear out faster. Our studies on various fleets showed that tires that got too hot (over 180°F) and were under-inflated by more than 10% needed replacing more often. This can be costly and risky. It costs about $120 to retread a tire and between $600 and $1,200 to buy a new one.

Wear Rate

A four-month study looking at the wear patterns on 10 truck-trailers found that drive tires wore out twice as fast as steer tires. This difference stems from factors like traction and torque, weight distribution, driving conditions, aggressive driving, and braking. These driving behaviors affect the wear of drive tires more than steer tires.

Brand Advantage

Our data shows that premium brand tires are more beneficial than lower priced tires. Premium tires showed significantly fewer problems like slow leaks and critical issues related to low tread and pressure. When analyzing multiple fleets, we found that using premium tires led to a 13.6% decrease in critical tire-related incidents and a 3% increase in fuel efficiency compared to economy brands. In a separate study of six DSP fleets covering around 5 million miles, premium tires proved more advantageous, providing an additional 1,000 miles per tire and a 12% increase in mileage.

Sustainability

From the fuel savings already mentioned to replacement tire impact, managing your tire performance supports your sustainability goals. We calculated that, for the 3-fleet study mentioned above, manufacturing just the necessary replacement tires would require approximately 15 gallons of oil per tire and 16 lbs of steel per tire. That’s over 450 gallons of oil and 480 additional pounds of steel in aggregate for this study.

Avoiding labor and downtime costs

Labor and downtime costs make handling tire damage an even bigger cost for your fleet.. Vehicles in this study required over 30 hours of unscheduled labor to fix tire concerns, and time spent off the road created risks of missing delivery deadlines.

More Operational Insights

Along with the trends above, AI-powered sensors and analysis help OPex and CAPex in other ways. Revvo’s TireIQ™ is an AI-powered fleet management software platform to automatically connect, monitor, and manage vehicle tires. Custom dashboards and proactive alerts give fleet managers real-time recommendations and reports on tire health, safety, fuel efficiency, and more.

Some extra insights from TireIQ include:

• Leak Detection. TireIQ can determine if a vehicle tire is undergoing a slow leak. In some cases, predictive fleet analytics can uncover whether a vehicle is at greater risk given the conditions of its route.
• Real-time Driver Alerts. Alerts for high tire temperatures from TireIQ can help drivers learn of overloading issues, prompting better training, or giving a clearer contrast between maintenance services.
• Tread Loss Rate Comparisons. TireIQ gives a detailed analysis of tread wear over time so that maintenance teams can predict expected tire life and schedule low-disruption service calls.

Dynamic Temperature Alert

Continuous monitoring of tire cavity temperature can quickly alert you to potential mechanical problems. This proactive approach improves vehicle safety and performance by providing timely alerts, mitigating risks, and ensuring optimal functionality.

 

Each day, Revvo analyzes over 500 million data points to help fleet managers make sense of their information. We aim to give you useful and easy to use observations that can be integrated with Geotab — no hardware required. For more information, visit the Revvo solution page on the Geotab Marketplace.