Episode 048: Ron Zima with Go Green Communications Inc

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Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right, welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host Josh Turley, joined today by Jeff Jenkins.

Hey guys.

Steve Salzgiver.

I'm here today.

You are, you're here and alive.

Yeah, it's, uh, been a few weeks.

So, and we've got a very special guest today, Ron Zima. Thanks, John.

Hi, nice to be here with you guys.

So we want to give you a chance to kind of introduce yourself to our listeners here.

Sure.

One of the, you know, somebody emailed in a question to the podcast asking us about, you know, rising fuel prices and, you know, just the overall fuel crisis that we have going on. And you were one of the first people that we thought of as somebody who's an expert in this field. And so why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners, give them a little background on who you are and and what you and your organization do.

Sure. So Ron Zima, Idle Free Guy, I'm known as professionally. And basically what we do at Go Green Communications, we're based in Canada, but we're working with fleet organizations around the US and Canada, particularly utility fleets as well as municipal agencies. In the US. So what we do, Josh, is we are the creators of idle reduction behavior modification. So it is a— you could say it's a, it's a new category within fleet management. And so basically what we do is we, we help fleet managers, fleet operators get their drivers to care about their idling behavior. And the program works quite well. We, we not only have certified students or what we refer to as Idle Free for Our Kids for Fleet certified students, we have raving fans of our program to the extent that I had one senior manager tell me that he had taken out the auto start-stop in his vehicle because it was really irritating him. He went through our program and he— the next thing he did was he reinstalled that. So, it has this effect and it's changed lives. I've talked to a number of people where it's literally changed lives when people understand that, wow, I had no idea that restarts were basically okay. So, what we do is we help fleet operators get their drivers to care about idling. That's what we do.

And I like— you called it idle reduction behavior modification.

Yep. Idle reduction behavior modification.

It's almost like, you know, like this is a reconditioning camp. You know, you're going to come here and get reeducated on it because it is— there's like this ingrained culture, this ingrained status quo when we talk about idle reduction, you know, especially depending on the climate you're in up north in the winter. Out here in summer, like you don't want to turn your engine off because it just, you know, you need the heat or you need the cool and you need the climate control. And so it's— I like that you're talking— it's idle reduction behavior modification. It really comes down to like a behavior and an attitude adjustment, right? It's a good focus. So.

Right. Well, yeah, go ahead.

So thinking about, you know, the current state of affairs that we're in right now, Obviously, your, you know, your thinking and the philosophies that you have definitely feel timely. You know, they were timely before, but now they feel like people are probably way more open to the ideas of, well, maybe we do need to look at our idle policies and we need to look at our fuel spend. What would you say? I mean, you know, I have a feeling I know where you're going to go, but, you know, like the number one thing they need to look at first when they're looking at, you know, trying to adjust for fuel spend or trying to mitigate some of the volatility that you see in the market?

Right. Well, the number one, the number one step they need to take is the business case. And that's the most exciting part of this is, you know, there was a time for quite some time, Josh, where Many of these idle reduction programs are basically just feel-good programs, awareness programs, but they weren't really tracking the metrics. We're a very metrics-focused company, and we know our clients are too. So, I hate to sound worn, but if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. But it's so true with this metric. And I think one of the biggest things in addition to helping operators get drivers to care about idling is we just need to promote the metric. And the metric will get fleet funders, fleet operators very interested. So as an example, we published a white paper called Idle Cost Metrics in the US and Canada. And I call it a point of view paper because, you know, it was interspersed with a lot of my point of view, but it was based on a a lot of very credible sources, not least of which was Cummins and a number of OEMs and what have you. But inside this PDF, about 8 pages, we just show you a lot of the published numbers. And by the way, my good friend George Servant edited this as well. So he's a guy that's well known to many in the fleet industry and has been around and knows the metrics and probably is one of the top fleet minds anywhere who understands the economics of idle management. And in this PDF, we basically say the takeaway is idle reduction from driver behavior modification in a fleet's gasoline and diesel burning assets is the biggest combined cost, greenhouse gas, and air pollution reduction opportunity for fleet operators in the US and Canada in all fleet industry sectors.

So it applies to everybody, you know, it's not just trucking, it's not just transit or city, it's, it's every, everybody who runs a vehicle. Yeah, this has an effect.

Yeah. And by the way, by the way, I am pro-trucker. I am, you know, uh, before coming, uh, on the air, um, you know, we joked that, hey, we're, we're gonna, you know, uh, make the truckers stop idling all night long to keep their comfort. Absolutely not. That's a management issue. As you guys would know, the truck drivers need the equipment and need the proper tools to do their jobs. They've got one of the toughest jobs. And but when they— if we were to layer this program over a trucking operation, it would provide not only the ability for the operator to reduce their costs, and probably pay for some, some bunk heaters or what have you. But the truck driver himself is going to save a huge amount of cash because our program evangelizes students in their personal vehicles. So that's where this really takes root. It's, it's, it's what we've, what we've seen is a very powerful psychological behavior strategy where drivers really understand what it means to their values. 3 values we call universal values relative to idling or unconscious idling behavior. And basically, they are my kids, my cars, my cash. What is my unconscious idling behavior How is it affecting my kids or people I really care about, their health, their, their air quality, what have you? What is my idling behavior doing to my vehicle? My personal vehicle blows them away. And finally, when they understand that, yeah, if I'm idling 200 engine hours a year like I used to, in today's dollars, depending on your fuel burn and type of vehicle, class of vehicle, the truck driver is going to save $400 or $500 a year, just like that. So, yeah.

So as you're addressing this, you're addressing it through, like, what I would call intrinsic motivation, right, where you're trying to get to their, their core and their, you know, like almost their purpose beyond an extrinsic, which would be, you know, like financially motivated or incentivized.

Right.

And it sounds like you're teaching them through, like, their own personal vehicles, like, you know, because— and I actually think this is brilliant if you're going this way. You know, I don't know exactly, but if you're teaching them, like, how to care about this on a personal level, because that's going to hit them in their own wallet, that those behaviors and attitudes carry over as they're driving work vehicles. You know, because I could see this with work vehicles is, "Oh, well, that's not my money. It's not my deal." Like, you know, if I'm not an owner-operator and I just work for, you know, like Night Swift, if I don't sharing the profit, or I, like, it doesn't really bother me. I'm just going to keep running the engine.

Exactly, exactly.

If I change my behavior for my own personal vehicle, then just adopting those habits will transfer to my work vehicle.

Here's the deal, Josh. It's not a mutually exclusive habit.

Yeah, but you can't, like, you can't just turn it off, right? You get into a different cab and you're like, oh no, I'm not the different— I'm a different person now.

I'm an idle-free driver now. They start looking. It's amazing how the psychology works because once you really buy into this and it happens at home, it's home buy-in. But it's supported. It works really well because what happens is management buys the program, invests in the program, and the drivers are you know, like I say, evangelized in their personal vehicles. But then they report to work as enthusiastic. 80% or greater of the time, over time, drivers eventually become enthusiastic participants because of the metrics, because of the way they're onboarded, because of— it's a process. And we've gotten to know how to do this. But at its basic level, It's based on 3 very powerful values. And again, that's my kids, my cars, my cash. And to anybody that wants to begin a program to start cutting into those drastic price hikes, start talking about what this is costing in your employees' vehicles. Start talking about those 3 values. You will get their attention.

Yeah. So Ron, what would you say is like an average cost savings by going through a program and doing, you know, kind of an idle-free mentality? Because it's great to say, right, that we've got this program and it can save money. But until you quantify that for someone— and I get it, different vehicles have different burn rates, you have different costs per diesel or regular fuel. But if you were just a government fleet and you were— you had a bunch of, let's say, police cruisers, that were just driving around and they went through this program, what's the actual cost per vehicle on an annualized basis that they would see those savings?

That's a loaded question because really it does depend on— here's the way we approach this. The way we approach this, and you guys know this, that every fleet operation out there is a uniquely different organization with a different set of challenges and everything else. Sure, there's a lot of basics that are the same from the class of vehicle and everything else, but then you put it in different operating geographies, temperatures, all kinds of things, driver mentality, the nature of the job, what have you. So, but what we do is what we say, and this earns the operator's trust very early on. We say, look, we got to do the business case. You know, take a look at all our materials and everything else. You're going to find them very compelling. But at the end of the day, it's the business case. So what we do is what we say is an idle reduction opportunity assessment. And that's a powerful spreadsheet that we have that once the operator gives us a basic grocery list of their fleet assets, including number of vehicles, average fuel burn over the year, number of drivers to be trained, we can turn around and give you a very good forecast of what you will save with this program over 2 years. Because when we do a program, it's, it's just like safety. It's not one and done. It's a continuous management process. And that's what most operators are looking for. They know this probably isn't going to be a one-and-done thing. And it certainly isn't because there is regression and that sort of thing. There's churn, what have you. But at the end of the day, we say business case first and then you can take a— now I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to give you an example of an idle reduction opportunity assessment that we did with a vocational fleet in the northern US. And 2,500 assets. I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but I've quoted these so many times that I'll remember pretty close. So what we said was, okay, and what we tell any client is we forecast with this estimate tool that we can usually do at least 30%, and we would rate 30% reduction in driver idling, and that's driver choice idling. So we know the difference between, you know, the difference between power takeoff idling and just driver— we call it driver choice idling. And that's where the operator of the vehicle has a choice to either leave it on or turn it off. And their bias is to leave it on. That's why we have a 6.6 billion gallon a year idling problem or habit around the US and Canada. But, you know, what we say is if we can reduce driver choice idling in the first 2 years by 30% within this fleet, they would net— and this is before the gas price hikes and the, and the, the Ukraine crisis. They would save at all costs, at all costs of our program, $4.5 million over 2 years.

So I'm kind of intrigued by your numbers. Um, almost, almost exactly 10 years ago, I put together an idle program for a large beverage company, right, out across the US and US and Canada. And when we started we were idling 41% of the time, or we had 10,000 tractor-trailers that were idling.

Yep.

You know, 41% of the time. We went on, we went into, um, we may— we didn't make, but we encouraged all of our people to set the anti-idling to 5-minute shutoffs.

Yep.

And so what that did is it brought our idling down to 20%, and then we put telematics on our vehicles.

Yep.

And incentivized our people to go through exactly some of the things you're talking about.

Yeah.

And we got down to 8% idling, which from your numbers is actually the 30% reduction, right?

Yep.

So firsthand knowledge tells me in my mind that you're, everything you're saying is, you know, computes in my head.

Yeah.

And we, we, we had a, we cascaded a report every week. Um, we had, uh, 5 divisions, uh, I'm gonna say probably 70 market units. Each one of them had their own score.

Yeah.

And, uh, beautiful, you know, and each one of them was incentivized to be ranked and we ranked them and then the winner every month, we would have a party with them and it really was a pretty successful program.

I'm sure it was. Excellent. Yes.

Yes.

It saved us, oh, let's see, saved us, uh, 5% on our overall fuel bill just from idling. And at that time we were doing $200 million a year. So yeah, what is that? Uh, you know, it's, uh, $10 million a year just from idling.

Yeah. But that was, that was actually a pretty, it was probably what, 15, 20 years ago, uh, dollar, dollar numbers. Yeah.

Yeah, it was in— it was in 2012, so I don't know what that fuel was there. Probably $3, $3 a gallon, I guess.

Yeah, it sounds about right.

Yeah, yeah.

So taking it from 40% to 80%. Yeah, yeah. It only— it only saved you 5% on your fuel cost because most of your fuel cost comes from load. But, you know, that's still a significant, you know, that 40% of your engine hours, which if you're driving your PMs off of engine hours, then now you're over-PMing because of idle time.

Exactly. Yeah, it's— I mean, a lot of—

there's a lot of cascading.

A lot of people have gone to fuel consumption just for that issue.

Yeah.

And, and fellas, here, here's the deal. What— right now we're just hanging our business case, our, our hat on fuel savings. And Steve, was I talking about, about the program?

It was.

Yeah, yeah, Steve.

So it was Steve.

I, I don't have a camera here. I can't see anybody else. Um, The—

yeah, I'm the old guy in the room.

So, so, you know, you know, that's just the beginning of the costs, which is fuel. But then there's the downstream. The downstream costs are just insane. And ever since, you know, the California, you know, CARB came out with their 2006 regulations on, on diesel and cleaning up diesel, I mean, today's diesels and generally anything built in the last 10 years just can't stand idle. They, they do not like idle. So then you've got the, you know, the DPF, the diesel particulate filters, you've got the aftertreatment systems and, and all of that. And they cannot handle idle time today. So it is imperative that anybody that's, you know, running a lot of heavy-duty diesel assets that they get their drivers to reduce idling and keep it to a minimum.

That's actually a good incentive. Otherwise you're going to be off the side of the road down because your DPF is all plugged up.

That's right.

Regenerating all the time because you let it idle.

Exactly.

So, so, Steve. Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead, Rob.

Well, I was just going to say, so what we do in my standard dog and pony slideshow, we show the downstream costs. I mean, fuel is just the beginning and it's probably— yeah, it's the biggest. We don't know for sure. We don't know for sure if fuel is the biggest cost avoidance metric in driver idling behavior. Here's why. So then you start adding maintenance and compromised warranties.

Okay.

Because, you know, operators, you know, there's operators out there that are basing their preventative maintenance on miles and not hours. And or is it hours? I'm probably confusing myself there, but either one of them, it's either or both.

Either one of them is negatively impacted by idling.

Dealer's choice, right?

Right. Then there's lifecycle costs. I was talking to George Servant about this, and George knows quite a bit about that. He used to manage several of the largest fleets in the US, including Time Warner, now Charter, and they were spending a lot on idle. And George was telling me that, yeah, when you take a look at these vehicles that, especially in an urban area, as you could guess, or even in a non-urban area where the vehicle's just idling on site a lot of the times, and that's what they do. But in an urban area, you know, it's even tougher with that stop-and-go city traffic and what have you. But you've got— George was saying that life cycles are— how shall I— they're deformed. If you take a look at the bathtub curve of how the lifecycle should work with a vehicle that's been properly operated over its life. Idling flattens that curve. It just, it blows out your business model on your lifecycle cost scenario. So then there's vehicle downtime. There is employee productivity because of that. And this happens a lot within those big utilities, right? So the guys are idling the line trucks or what have you. They now they've, they've got to be serviced and it's, it's just a cascading effect. Then we haven't even talked about carbon emissions, how rich this is in saving greenhouse gas emissions. Then there's air quality and then there's safety risk. Vacant vehicle idling. How many times have we seen, you know, big trucks sitting in a coffee shop somewhere with nobody in it and they're having their coffee? And then there's fleet reputation. So that's the cascading effect of leaving the key on in a diesel or gasoline asset today. In my—

it's interesting, you brought, you brought back a conversation I had with George probably a year ago now, but one of the metrics he was using that I hadn't really thought about in my career, and I've been around a long time, but it was, um, fuel consumption per mile.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it was sort of his metric that he used, which kind of goes back to everything we're talking about here today. He thought that was the most accurate, um, basically the most accurate metric you could use because, um, That's what's— that's really what matters in the long run is the fuel consumption.

Well, and it's the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, because if your fuel burn rate, you know, is X and you're operating this type of vehicle and it has this, you know, job requirement and mission and what have you, and it's out of whack. Yeah, George really believes in the fuel burn metric and now so do I. I just Everybody measures fuel quite closely, right?

Yeah, most trucking companies have a big hand on the MPGs, right? Because based on your idle, it can go up and go down. Um, so Steve brought up when he was talking about what he did at that fleet, how they incentivize the drivers to reduce their idle. My question to you is, do you recommend incentivizing drivers? Because earlier you're talking about how you've got your 3 different things and you're appealing to people on a personal level. Let's be honest, most people don't care. They are going to drive their company's vehicle, they're going to burn their company's gas because it's not coming out of their pocket, right? There may be some type of a, a penalty or disciplinary action if you're abusive to those different practices, but overall, right, a lot of people just aren't going to do it. And I know I was in trucking for 20 years, and I will tell you, we had our idle time, we wanted to be at 12%, and it— we would be lucky if 15% of the fleet would be under that 12%, and most of it would be well above that. And it's because they want to be comfortable when they're in their vehicle.

Yeah, yeah. Um, however, and, and I'll talk about incentives here, incentives in just a second, but let's— I really start to look at the transportation world, um, with two different lenses right now. One for the Class 8 world and one for the vocational world. And, um, And we're focused on the vocational side right now. But I do recognize, and we know that, yes, the leaders that are managing and the leaders that know the most about the economics of idle as well as keeping it under a certain point. In fact, I've had leaders in the trucking world tell me that, yeah, if you're at 15% or less, then you're running a pretty good operation for idle. And so, that 8% that you mentioned there, Steve, was stellar, right? We know that. However, you know, within that, those are operations that have totally different missions as well as demands, as well as the fact that they're professional drivers and their churn rate. What's the churn rate in trucking? Is it close to 100%?

Pretty much, uh, it's over 100%. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's over 100. It depends on the company, obviously, but on average it's over—

it's probably over the road, it's probably 120, 110%.

Yeah, right.

And those, those operators, those vehicles, they're driving as their primary source of income. Okay, um, right. It's their, it's their task. It's, it's all about transportation, hauling goods, whereas Many vocational operators have a totally different world and a totally different view. They're not sleeping in the truck overnight. They don't have that requirement. They've got to do a lot. They've got to operate tools off the vehicle. They've got to do a lot of different things. So it's a different world. And so we're focusing right now on the vocational side because we do know that a lot of the Class 8 world has got a handle on this. And by the way, shout out to NACFE and, and, uh, Dave Schaller and those guys over there who, you know, are continuing to, uh, to really, uh, be at the, at the leading edge of idle reduction in the Class 8 world.

Well, it's so, you know, now we've— I think we've really hit like idle is definitely a huge thing. I mean, Steve, you're talking about major savings when you're at that beverage distributor. Owner-operators definitely have an incentive to do their own, right? And it sounds like if you're going to be a fleet and you have a, you know, if you're a trucking company over the road, taking even if it, let's say it was $5 million that you saved or $10 million that you saved, you know, you take half of that and you put it out into an incentive program, you can make a serious dent.

So I was thinking it'd be nice to have like a revenue share, you know. Yeah, they incentivize the driver.

So hey guys, if we do this then, and we, and maybe you disproportionately, you reward the people that you were celebrating they get a bigger chunk of the pie, you know, based on the percentage of idle reduction. Well, what other strategies? Yeah, go ahead, Ron.

Yeah, here's a strategy, Josh, as well. So part of our solution, in addition to providing the emotional engagement, which many of the thought leaders in the industry tell us is the right strategy, and we've gone after it. And fellows, I have to tell you, and Josh, I think Once you— hey, let's do a challenge here, Josh. You take our program and let's see how emotionally engaged you get. Okay? All right?

Right. Just on my personal vehicle. Yeah, I'll take that up.

Okay.

And then you'll—

He needs it with that gas.

91 octane is killing me right now.

So, we'll get you to take the program and then think about the psychological strategy afterwards. But with regards to incentives, absolutely, they are powerful. But we would also observe that our program is very unique. There's no other program like it. Drivers, when they log in for the first time, love the learning management system. But what they really appreciate is this doesn't look like all the other driver training or safety training I've ever taken. This is, this is, this is great. They're really entertained. They're enlightened. They can't believe the stuff they're picking up, you know, about restarts, about warming up, about how today's technology right across all classes basically is equipped to reduce idle from, you know, the amount of— hey, listen, Josh, I used to idle my car in the '70s, okay, in Western Canada when it was -40. So I know what it's like to idle a lot. Okay. But I just—

I don't know why you would live in Western Canada when it's -40. Like, there's no part of me that says that's a good idea.

Or she can say to you, why do you live here with 120?

I have a swimming pool.

Well, we're definitely on the, on the extremes of the weather, weather curve there. But, but I've eliminated about 90% of my idle. 90% of my idle I've eliminated. And I used to idle 200 engine hours a year. So I was the American idler. Okay. And now, I understand. I started talking to the car guys because all these emissions around my kids' school. I'm just going, "Why are we as parents idling outside?" And it's like being vented inside the school. Talked to my school principal and she said, "Yeah, what you got to do is get the kids involved because with the kids involved, like we did with recycling, they bring the parents along like you wouldn't believe." And sure enough, we did a campaign, our very first campaign at my kids' school. And we took that tact. And pretty soon, we had a car dealer doing the sponsorship. One thing led to another. I had fleets asking me to put that program into a program for them because they had an idling problem. And that's what happens with emotional engagement. That's the point I'm trying to drive. And this is also part of the answer to the question of incentives. Because when the drivers really understand how much they're going to save, we give them a tool called the Idle Free Calculator, which is really popular in our program. And basically what we do is we make it real easy for drivers to add up their minutes, their, their idle incidences daily and weekly, and then calculate how much fuel and CO2 they're going to save in their type of vehicle that they select on the front end. And drivers are really, really— they just love this calculator because it spits out a number of like $500 or $400 in their, you know, in their Escalade, right? And They're hooked. And then also how much CO2. It's emotional engagement. So they're incentivized. They feel that, well, we've been incentivized, right? Thanks for buying this program for us. But I totally agree that once a program like this is in place, it's a great idea to be able to keep those drivers engaged. And what we do with our program included with it is what we call IdleFree Manager predictive analytics. So we've got a predictive analytics tool that layers on top of any number of telematics providers and basically gives the operator actionable intelligence from— they can slice and dice this data any which way they want and have it automated to their device. And this also includes drivers at the driver level. So, what we're talking about here is, you know, you've heard the term gamify, but this truly is the opportunity to not only continuously manage this, but to really keep the drivers engaged. And could you create a little bit of an incentive, you know, between districts, between locations, between quadrants of a city. Absolutely. And I love the way you were talking about that before, Steve, because take it all together, this is what we call building a culture. So, yeah.

So one of the things I feel like we'd be remiss if we didn't talk— is there alternatives to idling? I mean, I think about the Webasco things out there, the perky idling. You know, batteries and alternatives.

Um, well, I think there's other things you can do, right? Like, Al Curtis actually had a pretty good post on LinkedIn the other day talking about 4 different things you could do. Idling was a big part of it. Um, he talked about eliminating trips altogether, right?

Right.

Like, if you don't need to make the trip, then don't make the trip. You know, we talk about carpooling, things of that nature, which, you know, it helps eliminate fuel if you don't have to do that. Uh, ridesharing.

I was just thinking I forgot to share my blog I wrote yesterday with you. Oh yeah, because I put that in there. I sent it to Mary.

Steve holding out on me.

Jeff, I don't know if you have one other, one other observation, Josh, and that is, uh, George and I took a look at the marketplace, and, um, uh, it's George's belief and mine as well, reviewing a lot of information, a lot of data, and and market intel is that 70— this is, this is an assimilation of a lot of perspective. See if it resonates with you guys. About 70% of fleet operators in North America aren't tracking idle time data. And about— because it's, you know, data overload. And that's why our Idle Free Manager predictive analytics is a key piece of our value proposition. But It's, you know, where was I going with that? What was I saying? Sorry.

You were giving us other ideas.

Right.

Right.

So nobody's tracking their— nobody knows how much they're spending on idling.

Right, right. So 70% of fleets aren't tracking. They don't even know where they are on their idle. They, they're eyeballing it. They know it's bad, but they don't know exactly what it is.

And they're avoiding where they just need to start. Right. You know, go out and just start measuring how much are you actually spending on idle, you know. And if you're like Steve and you realize, well, 40% of our engine hours are spent during idle, you have a pretty significant amount of fuel spend and engine wear on idle time, you know. And if you've got telematics that can give you that, um, you know, you can look at your, like, you know, your MPG or hours per gallon and gallons per hour. Yeah, it would also show quite a few things there, you know, if you've got vehicles that are specifically idling or if you've got drivers that are really heavy idlers. So you'd see that.

Yeah.

So, well, hey, Ron, this has been a lot of fun and we've enjoyed the conversation with you today. Any last thoughts, Steve, Jeff, as we sign off with our listeners?

You know, I guess just one, one thought for me is, you know, another way to be able to reduce fuel costs outside of idle time is watch that out of route as well. Watch where people are taking their vehicles and going. You know, we used to have big issues with people going to the store and personal errands and that kind of thing.

Dry cleaning.

Yeah, just whatever. And that can help reduce it a lot. And, you know, Ron, like you said, you've got to measure things and whether it's your idle time or you're out of route miles or just, you know, anything that is going to have an adverse effect on that business.

Yes.

Well, I think Josh brought up, brought up the thing. If you don't need to do the trip, don't do the trip. You know, I think that's— or you can consolidate trips as well. So, I mean, there's a number of things out there that can help you save fuel.

Which you should be doing anyways, right?

Mm-hmm.

And, but now that when you have a fuel price that's $5 a gallon or $6 a gallon for diesel, it just becomes that more imperative. It's, it's exacerbated, right? It's all exponential at this point.

So I think the last thing I'll say is I used to be exasperated when they tell me to turn off my vehicle at a drive-in window for fast food.

Mm-hmm.

Then I bought a diesel truck. Now I can't hear 'em. So I have to turn my truck off.

Well, it's just because you're old.

Yeah, yeah, that's probably my hearing aids.

No, but, uh, it, you know, it is. And I've got, like, I remember, you know, I just upgraded my truck a little while ago, and, and it's got the auto start-stop on it, and it made a, you know, it makes a huge difference, you know, uh, having that technology, you know, having an up-to-date vehicle. So thank you very much.

One last thing, I was just going to say on the data side, because my mind was wandering, but about 5%, only 5% of fleet operators, which fits with our POV paper, 40% of engine hours, but 5% of operators across the US and Canada have done what George has referred to as a full-court press on idle reduction. And so that includes everything that we've been talking about here and only 5%. And, you know, one of those operators would have been the one that Steve was referring to in that 5%. So it's a huge opportunity right at a time when we've got to cut, you know, we've got to, you know, reclaim budget as well as just cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media @fleetsuccess. See you next time.

Establish energy independence as well. It's a two-pronged approach to that problem. So, all right, Ron, well, thank you very much. And, you know, we'll see you around on LinkedIn and, you know, all the ideas that you had. And obviously I got to take this challenge now, go through the course. I'll be happy to report back to the listeners on how that goes. But as always, I want to remind you guys, we have the Fleet Success Summit coming up April 20th, 21st out here in Mesa, Arizona. You go to fleetsuccesssummit.com, hear all kinds of ideas on different ways to become more efficient with your resources, you know, like today. You can enter the code PODCAST for a discount on your registration. So be sure to do that and then tag us on social media wherever you follow us.