Samsara targets $2B in recoverable fleet fuel spend

“So they can actually see with their own eyes here is the percentage of my spend that I canclaw back and save,” Yu said.

The dashboard breaks that number across idling, driver behavior, fraud, suspicious fuel drops, and fueling at the wrong locations. It then tells managers what to do about each one: turn on in-cab idling alerts, add a preferred vendor, and watch the trend by quarter.

Fuel routing built into the route

Commercial Navigation works by building preferred stops into a route before the driver leaves the yard. It prices the route against a fleet’s corporate negotiated rates, and it reroutes to the nearest preferred station when fuel runs low mid-trip. In a 90-day analysis of more than 2,000 Samsara customers, organizations that fueled at preferred vendors cut a median of 4% from fuel spend.

Samsara pulls transactions from any fleet’s existing fuel card. It integrates Coast’s spend controls directly and connects to WEX and Comdata, and fleets can import the discounts they have negotiated with individual truck stop chains.

“Irrespective of whether using Coast, WEX or Comdata, we can get a kind of collective understanding about what they’re spending,” Yu said. “We have knowledge on where the best places are to fuel and the cheapest places are to fuel.”

Yu walked through a hypothetical example of a driver leaving Chicago for Austin, Texas, on a fleet that has already loaded its negotiated truck stop discounts into the system.

“If I as a driver go into commercial navigation, I start in Chicago and I type in Austin, Texas as a destination, what commercial navigation will do is it will take a look at all the real-time fuel prices, the discounts that my fleet has, and formulate the exact route and stops that I should take while taking into account where I should fuel to save the most money” he said.

Samsara knows the tank data because it knows the truck data.

“We know how many gallons the tank holds because we know what the make, model, and year is,” Yu said. “We know it’s at 80% when you start in Chicago, and we know how far that gets you to Texas. From there, we can calculate the exact spots you need to fuel based on how quickly your fuel will deplete, and the discounts your fleet has with specific truck stops.”

That piece is in beta. Yu said Samsara is rolling it out to customers now.

Card authorization tied to vehicle location

Fuel card fraud tracks the pump price. A Samsara analysis found detected fraud incidents rise roughly 9% for every 10-cent increase in the price of diesel. Samsara ties card authorization to vehicle location and blocks the transaction when the assigned vehicle is not present.

“We used to worry about fraud all the time. Cards went missing, PINs were shared, and we had no way to verify transactions,” said Tim Weisser, fleet operations manager at Milestone Home Services, in Samsara’s announcement. “Now with Coast and Samsara, the system takes care of it. If the truck’s not there, the card doesn’t work. Simple.”

“After implementing Coast through Samsara, we saw our fuel expenses drop by nearly $15,000 a month,” said Kyle Stewart, chief financial officer at Trades Holding, in the same announcement.

The check happens at the pump, before the charge clears.

Route adherence is the next build

Visibility is the first step for a fleet without a dedicated fuel department. Compliance is the second, and Samsara is building it now. Yu said the reporting will show how every driver performed against the route they were given, and why the ones who deviated did.

“With commercial navigation, we have full native visibility into what drivers are actually seeing on the ground, because they’re always in turn-by-turn navigation when they’re driving. So we can actually display to the fleet admin, hey, they didn’t stop here because maybe there was traffic or some other condition like weather,” Yu said.

“We’re also able to do things downstream like recognizing a driver who’s adhered to their route and is doing really well. Here’s how we can recognize them, here’s how we can reward them, ” Yu said.