How Telematics Help Fleets Fight Off CPM Increases

These items represent real money leaving real operations on every load, every day. And for most fleets, the most damaging aspect of these costs is their relative invisibility.

Fuel is wasted in patterns that emerge in aggregate and are magnified especially during volatile commodity market periods. Assets sit underused while other units run hard. Insurance premiums reflect risk profiles that fleets haven’t documented their way out of. A lawsuit builds from a safety culture that looked fine on paper until it wasn’t.

Telematics converts invisible operational losses into visible, actionable data. The difference between knowing and not knowing is increasingly the difference between margin and losses. This whitepaper examines five areas where telematics can alleviate or reverse cost-per-mile increases and how telematics solutions by Transflo and ATI, powered by the Geotab platform, deliver real savings and new levels of visibility.

Many fleets are running on lagging indicators. Fuel reports reveal inefficiencies that compounded for days or weeks before anyone saw them. Maintenance is on scheduled intervals or because a costly problem has been reported. Insurance is reviewed at renewal rather than managed continuously. Post-incident reviews happen after accidents that might have been prevented.

Without real-time visibility into what vehicles and drivers are doing, fleet managers, financial leaders, and owners are making decisions about an operation they can only partially see. And in an environment where fuel represents 20 to 30% of total operating costs, where a single nuclear verdict can reshape a carrier’s financial outlook, and where industry-wide estimates suggest as much as $45 billion worth of trucks and trailers are underutilized at any given time, the cost of incomplete information is enormous.

Telematics changes the model from reactive to continuous. It surfaces the data that lets fleets act before margin is lost rather than after. The five areas below are where that shift is most consequential.

ATRI’s 16.7% deadhead average represents fuel burned, equipment worn, and driver time spent moving toward freight rather than hauling it. When multiplied across a fleet and a full year, the cumulative cost is significant, and most of it is preventable with better visibility into where assets are and how they’re being deployed.

Underutilization on the parked side of the equation is also costly. An asset that sits unused still carries insurance, registration, and financing costs. Industry-wide, an estimated $45 billion worth of trucks and trailers are underutilized. Fleets that lack visibility into utilization patterns often hold onto underperforming assets longer than necessary and fail to redeploy capacity where it’s actually needed. 

Geotab’s telematics platform addresses this directly. The Asset Utilization Report surfaces the 10 most and least utilized vehicles in a fleet, giving managers a clear, ranked view of where imbalance exists. The Fleet Distance Trend Report tracks total distance against average distance per vehicle over time, revealing whether there is capacity to add, downsize, or redistribute.

The value of that visibility goes beyond route efficiency. BearCom, a leading two-way radio supplier and security solutions provider with nearly 700 vehicles across North America, learned just how far real-time asset tracking extends when one of their vehicles was stolen from a driver’s residence in Texas.

What they didn’t account for was that the tracking device kept transmitting location data throughout the night. By morning, the driver had reported the theft and police were on their way. Using the Geotab platform, a BearCom employee provided law enforcement with the vehicle’s exact location in real time. The vehicle was recovered in less than an hour with minimal damage.

“From an operational standpoint, the time, effort, and cost required to repair that vehicle was far, far less than if we had to replace it,” said Alex Vasquez, Supply Chain Operations Supervisor at BearCom. “It was a huge win.”

Fuel is the single largest variable expense in trucking. It’s also the cost most sensitive to behavioral and operational patterns that are invisible without comprehensive telematics.

A driver idling during a layover burns roughly one gallon of fuel per hour. Hard braking, rapid acceleration, and aggressive cornering compound fuel consumption while simultaneously accelerating vehicle wear. Speeding increases fuel burn measurably at highway speeds. None of these behaviors are visible to a fleet manager without the data to surface them.

The challenge with fuel efficiency is that the improvement levers are spread out and behavioral. Unlike a maintenance cost or new tires that show up on an invoice, fuel wasted through idling or aggressive driving is embedded in aggregate consumption figures that don’t point to a cause.

Geotab’s Cost Analysis Scorecard ties driver behavior directly to cost, surfacing idling duration and cost, speeding time and cost, harsh acceleration and braking events, and tire-wearing behaviors — all expressed in dollar terms that can be shared with drivers as coaching tools. The Average Fuel Economy Report provides trend analysis over time, making it possible to measure whether interventions are working.

Fuel price volatility adds further urgency. Diesel prices tend to swing more aggressively than regular gasoline, and geopolitical disruption can push national averages significantly higher in short windows. Fleets that have already squeezed behavioral inefficiency out of their operations are better insulated from those swings.

The litigation environment in trucking has changed dramatically over the past decade, and financial exposure has intensified with it. ATRI’s forensic analysis of trucking litigation found that tractor-trailer tort cases filed annually increased at an average rate of 3.7% from 2014 to 2023.

More concerning is the trajectory of nuclear verdicts, or jury awards exceeding $10 million. The median nuclear verdict reached $36 million in 2022, approximately 50% higher than the median in 2013. The share of verdicts exceeding $50 million rose by 6.4 percentage points over the same period.

What drives these awards is not always proportionate to actual harm. In more than 80% of verdicts exceeding $1 million, non-medical damages were up to 10 times higher than the actual medical costs incurred.

Telematics and in-cab video are, in this context, both a prevention tool and a legal one. AI dash cams detect distracted driving, monitor following distance, track lane departure, and flag aggressive driving behaviors in real time, giving fleet managers data to address dangerous patterns before they result in an incident. When an incident does occur, video footage clarifies fault and helps push back on or altogether exonerate from fraudulent or inflated claims. With 80% of truck accidents attributed to errors made by passenger vehicle drivers, fleets without video documentation are routinely in the position of paying for accidents they didn’t cause.

The coaching loop matters as much as the footage. Through Transflo and Geotab’s integration with Predictive Coach, driver behavior data — speed, hard braking, rapid acceleration, cornering, seat belt use — is pulled directly from a device and used to automatically assign targeted training to individual drivers based on their specific patterns. Training is delivered the same day an event occurs, completed on a smartphone, and documented for management. The result is a safety culture that is continuous, individualized, and legally documented.

Truck insurance premiums rose for the fifth consecutive year in 2024, reaching a record $10.20 per mile according to ATRI. In Q1 2025, carriers reported a 5.8% year-over-year increase. The commercial auto insurance market has remained unprofitable in recent years, with a combined ratio of 109.2% in 2023 — meaning insurers paid out 9.2% more than they collected in premiums. Tighter underwriting standards and rising premiums are the predictable result, and fleets without strong safety documentation are bearing the brunt of it.

The same telematics infrastructure that reduces accidents and strengthens legal defenses also provides the data insurers need to recalibrate risk. A FreightWaves survey of fleets using AI dash cams found that 40% reported lower insurance premiums after installation, 45% reduced legal fees and litigation risk, and 41% saw a decline in claim values. This new generation of dash cams has also been shown to reduce preventable accidents by up to 30% in the first year of deployment.

Fewer accidents mean fewer claims. Fewer claims lower the fleet’s risk profile. A lower risk profile improves negotiating position at renewal. And documented safety practices — coaching records, training completion, behavior trend data — give carriers concrete evidence to present to underwriters rather than asking them to take the fleet’s word for it. In an insurance market that is actively tightening the screws to carriers, fleets with telematics data are in a structurally better position than those without it.

Telematics generates a continuous stream of data about vehicle health, driver behavior, fuel consumption, route efficiency, and asset location. That data is only valuable if it reaches the right people in a format they can act on. Custom reporting is the layer that converts raw telematics output into decision-ready insights — and without it, even the best-instrumented fleet is leaving value on the table.

ATI by Transflo and Geotab feature myriad custom fleet management reports to address many concerns. Examples include:

• Fuel cost analysis ties driver behavior to total cost of operation, making the financial impact of idling, speeding, and aggressive driving visible in dollar terms
• Dynamic maintenance reminders use actual vehicle data to trigger service alerts based on due date, mileage, or engine hours rather than fixed schedules
• Exception details and trip histories let managers investigate asset exceptions at a granular level without manually filtering through trips data.
• Watchdog reports monitor telematics device health across the entire fleet, ensuring that the reports managers rely on are drawing from complete and accurate data.

Fleet managers who build these reports into regular workflows turn their operational know-how into a continuous improvement cycle that compounds over time.

Not every telematics benefit shows up at the same time, and understanding the return timeline helps fleets set realistic expectations and measure progress against the right benchmarks. The financial case builds in three distinct phases.

Within the first few months: fuel and behavior savings

The fastest return on a telematics investment comes from driver behavior data. Idling reports, fuel economy benchmarks, and driver scoring surface inefficiencies that are costing money right now. Because they are behavioral, they respond quickly to coaching.

A fleet that reduces average idling time by 30 minutes per driver per day, across a 100-truck operation, eliminates a meaningful and recurring fuel expense. Harsh braking and aggressive acceleration speed up tire wear and drivetrain stress, so the maintenance savings compound alongside the fuel savings.

Within the first policy cycle: insurance and claims impact 

Insurance premium reductions require a track record. But fleets that deploy AI dash cams and begin accumulating clean safety data are building that record from day one. By the time the next policy renewal arrives, the fleet has documented evidence of reduced incidents, completed driver training, and flagged-and-resolved safety exceptions.

The fleets that get discounts or frozen premiums the fastest are the ones that engage their insurers early, share data proactively, and treat the renewal conversation as a negotiation backed by documentation rather than a rate they have no choice but to accept.

Over the long term: litigation protection and compounding safety culture

The highest-stakes financial benefit of telematics is also the longest to fully materialize — but the protection it provides begins on the day of deployment. Every day a fleet operates with dash cams and documented coaching is a day it is building the evidentiary record that matters in litigation.

A fleet that has two years of continuous safety documentation, training records, and incident footage is in a structurally different legal position than one that installed cameras after a serious accident. The long-term compounding effect is a safety culture that is harder to attack in court, a claims history that keeps premiums manageable, and a driver workforce that has been coached continuously rather than corrected reactively.

The costs that are hardest to control are the ones that don’t appear immediately. Fuel wasted in daily driving patterns. Assets sitting idle while carrying costs accumulate. A safety culture that hasn’t been documented well enough to defend in court. Insurance premiums that reflect a risk profile the fleet hasn’t provided evidence to change.

In a market where ATRI puts the average operating cost at $2.26 per mile, margins in most sectors below 2%, and litigation exposure climbing year over year, the fleets building durable cost advantages are doing it through better information. Real-time visibility into assets, driver behavior, fuel consumption, and safety events gives fleet managers the data to act before costs compound — not after.

Transflo and ATI’s telematics solutions, powered by the Geotab platform, are built to deliver that visibility fleet-wide. From asset utilization reporting to AI dash cams to custom reporting and coaching integrations, the platform connects the data that matters to the decisions that move cost per mile in the right direction.