The psychology of fleet fuel efficiency

UK diesel hit £2 per litre for the first time ever on 28 September 2026. Across the EU, average diesel reached roughly €2.26 per litre in mid-September, up around 38% since late February on IRU figures. And this isn’t even the first fuel shock of 2026. Fleet managers who hoped that March’s pump price surge wouldn’t be repeated are now faced with another hole in their annual budget assumptions. 

While the number on the forecourt sign is non-negotiable, operators have a lot of control over how efficiently they use what they buy. But this is easier said than done. Managers know well which driving behaviours burn through fuel: idling, harsh acceleration, and speeding. But getting drivers to stop doing them is another task entirely. 

A company manager telling a busy driver that they should stop speeding is rarely enough to produce lasting behaviour change. To make fuel efficiency into a reflex, you have to ground the problem in ways that chime with drivers, and rewrite the incentive structures that motivate behaviour. In short, you have to make drivers care. 

Let’s look at how fleets have got their drivers onside in the fight against wasted fuel. 

Reframe what the waste really means 

Lanes Group is the UK's largest provider of wastewater solutions. With 4,000 vehicles in use across the country, management suspected that small, normalised inefficiencies were adding up to large sums.  

They were right. When they used Samsara to put a hard figure on it, they found idle time was running at 12% across the measured vehicles. This figure was even more unsettling when they converted it into money lost. Without its knowledge and against its will, the company was spending £155,000 every year just to pump emissions into the air. 

Lanes' drivers were the only people who could stop this continuing. This placed the onus on managers to sell idling reduction as an imperative to their own personnel. But while many companies might start with an appeal to the corporate balance sheet, that is exactly what Lanes knew they had to avoid. 

“Drivers aren’t motivated by what idling costs the company. They’re motivated by what it means for their health, their families, and their community,” said Nicola Martin, Head of ESG at Lanes Group. “Once you make it personal, the data starts to move.” 

This was the wisdom behind Lanes Group’s Fuel Down the Drain campaign. This internal communications initiative drew an explicit association between idling habits and the quality of the air that drivers, their families and their neighbours breathe, giving drivers a personal reason to change their habits. A saving on Lanes Group’s fuel bill is of most interest to their accounts department. For a driver, air pollution around the depot near their child’s school hits much closer to home. 

The campaign opened with myth-busting communications aimed at the beliefs that keep engines running, starting with the idea that the only way to keep a cab warm is to idle.

Provide incentives to change

Reframing the problem shows drivers that idling has implications beyond the company budget. Converting that awareness into sustained behaviour change needs a practical layer that targets the choices drivers make, consciously or unconsciously, across their working day. In Lanes’ case, this had two dimensions: intervention in the moment, and reward for performance improvements over time.    

Lanes Group enabled audio alerts on the Samsara AI Dash Cams in every cab. As soon as the devices detected unproductive idling, the driver would receive a nudge to turn off the engine. With their responses recorded, drivers could watch their performance metrics over time via the Samsara Driver App. Marked improvements would trigger personalised kudos messages, making sure drivers knew that their efforts would never go ignored. 

The specifics of these messages are instructive. One driver who saved 420 total hours of idle time received a message congratulating him on saving enough fuel to drive from London to Edinburgh and back more than four times. Expressing that saving as a percentage would have told him nothing.

The Fuel Down the Drain campaign drew much of its strength from the social bonds that exist within depots. Lanes took pains to make the efficiency drive into a collective endeavour, circulating news of performance improvements on a centralised Samsara Recognition page that staff could access. Weekly updates broadcast the difference the fleet was making, while drivers’ individual milestones were made public. 

When drivers began chasing the team for kudos, managers knew their efforts had hit the mark. The stats only confirmed it. Lanes had set an initial ESG target of a 50% cut in unproductive idling over the year. It smashed through that number within four months, taking idle time from 12% to 2%. This saved 100,000 litres of fuel, and stopped 260 tonnes of CO2e from entering the atmosphere. 

Always double-check your assumptions

This project would have failed if management hadn’t thought carefully about the particulars. Much of the Lanes fleet runs Power Take-Off (PTO) equipment, where keeping the engine running is crucial. If you send a driver an alert telling them to stop idling while their PTO is working, you will collapse trust in the whole operation.

That’s why the team tagged non-PTO vehicles separately, applied in-cab audio alerts to that group only, and connected PTO status to Samsara data, separating productive and unproductive idle time in reporting. The engineering requirement lined up nicely with the ethical one: measure the right thing before you hold anyone accountable for it. 

You can read the full story of Lanes Group’s efficiency campaign in more detail here. 

Make data a recurring source of pride

A campaign has a fixed start and end time, but an ingrained habit should last forever. That’s why relying on messaging alone could see your good efforts fizzle out once the initiative winds down and behaviour slowly drifts back to the old baseline. What makes new habits permanent is repetition, visibility and accountability: getting the data in front of drivers on a reliable schedule. 

Groupe RubanBleu, a French coach operator with 480 vehicles, hit its carbon reduction targets by making its data a shared monthly ritual. 

“Every month, we display the fuel consumption data and the drivers can see the progress they have made and the areas in which they can improve,” said Guillaume Bruneau, Director Pôle Interurbain at Groupe RubanBleu. “Some drivers are really getting into the game and challenging each other to achieve the best eco-driving performance.”

RubanBleu’s drivers take the lead from the data and set the standard for each other. That works because the comparison feels fair: colleagues on the same routes, in the same traffic, doing the same job. If the target were simply set top-down by head office, it might end up ignored. 

All this paid off. RubanBleu cut fuel consumption by an average of 14%, worth €49,000 a year, and idling-related fuel losses by 27%. You can read their full story here. 

Build something drivers would sign up to

In the wrong hands, these levers could have been turned against drivers. In-cab alerts can become a disciplinary log. A recognition page can become a league table of shame. To succeed, your programme must have a clear intention, a transparent architecture, and clear benefits to taking part. If drivers suspect your fuel efficiency programme is a ruse to manipulate them into accepting greater surveillance, they are unlikely to engage.

Lanes designed their programme in the right spirit, giving drivers an honest reason to care. After all, it’s not a lie that unnecessary idling pollutes the air that drivers, their families, and their neighbours breathe. The measurements used were scrupulously selected to be fair, right down to the PTO split. Drivers’ work went rewarded, and all the data was visible to them throughout. 

In the UK and Europe, this is a legal matter as well as an ethical one. Under UK and EU GDPR legislation, organisations generally need a lawful basis and purpose for processing driver data and to provide appropriate transparency. In several European countries, works councils must be consulted before monitoring tools go in. 

Make efficiency a reflex

Diesel prices will fluctuate, and there’s nothing you can do about that. But you can influence the thousands of small decisions your drivers make every day, most of them without thinking: whether the engine stays running during a delivery, a wait at the gate, or a call in a lay-by. Giving your drivers a good reason to care about how much fuel they’re using will keep you resilient in the face of inflation. 

Fuel isn’t the only cost climbing this year. The 2026 Fleet Cost-Saving Guide picks up where this piece leaves off, with the full story behind Lanes Group’s idling results. You can also read the stories of other operators who have brought down costs across their fleet, from insurance and maintenance to compliance and electrification. 

Find your fleet’s expensive blind spots. Download the 2026 Fleet Cost-Saving Guide