This week on the Oakley Podcast, hosts Jeremy Kellett and Megan Cummings welcome Corey Huey from the Recruiting Department to talk all things fuel. The conversation explores the significant impact of fuel costs on financial success, sharing insights on fuel consumption, discounts, and fraud prevention. Corey reveals that Oakley owner-operators collectively purchase over 13 million gallons of fuel annually, costing around 43 million dollars. The episode emphasizes the importance of using fuel cards for discounts, vigilance against fuel fraud, and strategies for improving fuel efficiency. Don’t miss this important information for drivers and owner-operators.
Key topics in today’s conversation include:
- Importance of Podcast Feedback and Community Engagement (1:15)
- Overview of Fuel Topics (3:06)
- Fuel Mileage Discussion (5:21)
- Fuel Costs for Owner-Operators (6:42)
- Fuel Spending Statistics (9:26)
- Impact of Fuel Prices (11:48)
- Fuel Discounts Overview (13:55)
- How Fuel Discounts Work (16:10)
- Fuel Fraud (19:04)
- Text Alert System (21:18)
- Reporting Fraud (22:53)
- Fuel Apps and Skimmers (24:25)
- Pre-authorization Issues (26:12)
- Geotab and Fuel Cards (30:27)
- Fueling at the Yard (31:59)
- Listener Comments on Fuel Mileage (33:18)
- Driving Habits and Fuel Savings (37:55)
- Final Thoughts and Takeaways (39:48)
Oakley Trucking is a family-owned and operated trucking company headquartered in North Little Rock, Arkansas. For more information, check out our show website: podcast.bruceoakley.com.
Transcription
Jeremy Kellett 00:13
Welcome to the Oakley podcast, trucking, business and family. This show is brought to you by Oakley trucking, headquartered at North Little Rock, Arkansas. The purpose of this podcast is to communicate with Oakley owner operators and their families by giving them up to date information concerning Oakley trucking and the trucking industry, from business advice to safety updates to success stories, also to give an insight to outside truck drivers that might be interested in joining the Oakley family. Hey, welcome to the Oakley podcast, trucking business and family. My name is Jeremy Kellett. I’m director of recruiting here at Oakley trucking, and I’m your host for this podcast. You know this podcast, we say trucking business and family, and that’s truly what this podcast is about, and it’s geared to our owner operators at Oakley trucking, along with every other truck driver, company driver or owner operator out there in the country. And we enjoy getting feedback from you guys by listening to the episode every week. We’re on like 24, 23 episodes. I mean, it just keeps going. And we really try hard. I want y’all to know that we try hard to bring you some good, relative content that will help you, help you be successful. We’re not a big news podcast, and talk about a lot of things everybody else has already talked about. We try to give you some good information here at the Oakley podcast, but to do that, I need feedback from you on a couple of things. One, you are our advertising. We need you to subscribe. I need you to share it with a friend. Tell somebody, you know, like it on YouTube. Check out all our social media too. But I need you to spread the word about the Oakley podcast. We feel like it’s, you know, it’s something good that we’re helping truck drivers. We’re trying to change the image of truck drivers. I think we all know, we, you know, truck drivers have a bad image. It’s like trucking companies, and we’re doing our best to try to to try to change that, little by little. So I just need your help to spread the word about Oakley, the Oakley podcast, and comment on as much as you can let us know your feedback on today’s episode, a little something different we’ve never dove into. But we’re going to talk about fuel today and I’m talking about things that are associated with fuel. We’re going to talk about fuel mileage that owner operators are really interested in. We’re going to visit on that a little bit to give you some stats, maybe some tips that other owner operators are doing to control their fuel mileage. We’re going to give you an idea of how much money is spent, how many gallons Oakley owner operators go through in a year’s time, that’ll floor you when you figure that out. We also got fuel discounts that we’re proud of. We’re going to share that with you. We’re going to share fuel fraud. That’s been a big deal this year, that we’ve got to talk about. And we need everybody to tune in and listen to that section for sure on fuel fraud and how to prevent it. Also we might touch a little bit on some fuel fuel taxes. We just got lots of stuff talking about fuel and to me with this, I had to pull in our fuel guru, Corey Huey. Corey actually manages all the EFS fuel cards and the EFS fuel system, and he knows a lot about that too. That’s going to help us with the fuel fraud. And he’s got some numbers too. And of course, my co host, Megan, yeah, hanging out with me. I
Megan Cummings 03:36
I was waiting for that part. I think you’re
Jeremy Kellett 03:37
gonna say anything but for that so. So here’s the deal for the people that are not watching us. I don’t know why they would not watch us, but, you know, I guess they’re driving down the road. Got to listen to it, but at some point, when you get stopped and you get a chance to tune in, you have got to check out our new Yeah, our new setup. We got rid of the chairs. We got a new podcast table. I mean, I
Megan Cummings 04:06
feel like we should be telling you what’s going to come on at 10pm No,
Jeremy Kellett 04:09
This is the official podcast table, you know. Thanks to Oakley for letting us get it and set this thing up. It looks awesome. Thanks
Megan Cummings 04:17
to you guys for setting it up. Yeah, yeah, it looks real
Jeremy Kellett 04:21
good. So let’s get cranked off here talking about first, I think let’s talk about a little bit of fuel mileage. And that’s something that we put out a question on social media yesterday or a couple days ago, asking about, what was the question? Actually, what’s your fuel mile? I
Corey Huey 04:37
Think, what was your fuel mileage? And what are things that you do that you can maybe improve on the road, you know. So,
Jeremy Kellett 04:45
so we got some comments, a lot of comments on that. Megan’s gonna read those after a while, because she loves this comment section where she gets in names and stuff. It’s my favorite part of the show. Plus we gotta take her mind off going to the dentist this afternoon. Well, thanks
Megan Cummings 04:59
for. Are you mentioning that to everybody? My palms have been sweaty all morning, worried
Jeremy Kellett 05:03
about a little cavity. I mean, well, tell everybody cavity. Well, I mean, we all have them at some point. I This is my first one,
Megan Cummings 05:10
at 26 years old. So if you’re going to tell people I have a cavity, also mention that you’re proud of how long I have to get one. Yeah, and you know what, maybe I’ll just not go,
Jeremy Kellett 05:21
No, you can’t cancel. Gotta do teeth. You gotta take your teeth. Hey, fuel mileage. Fuel is so let’s put it in perspective here, for ya, our listeners out there that maybe are not owner operators, let’s give them a quick example of how much fuel costs. Their biggest expense is fuel, right? Core, absolutely. I mean, even bigger than the truck. I mean, the fuel is the biggest expense that they have, right? So, how much fuel? How much fuel you think they buy a mega in a
Megan Cummings 05:56
week’s time, like per driver or
Jeremy Kellett 05:59
per truck? Yeah, that you you bought a truck, yeah, how much view you think you’ll burn, and how long and week a week,
Megan Cummings 06:09
every idea, well, gallons of money, money, okay, well, it’s okay. I Okay. So my Toyota gets 13 gallons. It’s a 13 gallon tank. Okay, right?
Jeremy Kellett 06:22
I don’t know, but okay with it. So
Megan Cummings 06:25
It takes me about a week to drive, a week to go through that. Okay, that’s Sunday to Sunday from cabbage, north, Little Rock. I don’t know why y’all are smiling. Great. Okay, okay, yeah, well, that’s what, 13 gallons in a week, right? Yeah, okay, well, so that didn’t help me, as I thought it
Jeremy Kellett 06:47
would be all right, let’s just get her off the spot there. Corey, sorry about that. I’d
Megan Cummings 06:52
say just round number 675, okay,
Jeremy Kellett 07:00
double that? Yeah, so, so let’s, let’s make it simple. If a guy runs, an owner operator runs, let’s say, 3000 miles in a week’s time to make it simple. 3000 miles and he gets, oh, average six miles a gallon. Yep, because that’s our company. The average is 5.9 that’s what it’s been the last few months. 5.9 miles per gallon. That’s what the whole fleet averages. Out of 900 owner operators, they average 5.9 so if you’re listening to this as one of our owner operators, you can kind of gauge where you’re at compared to the fleet average. But let’s just say 3000 miles divided by six miles a gallon, that’s 500 gallons of fuel that he bought for this week. Times make it simple, fuels about $3 a gallon. A gallon that’s $1,500 that that owner operator spent to run that 3000 miles in one week. So expensive. Fuel is expensive. It’s a big expense to all the owner operators out there. I mean, it takes up. It takes a lot of planning, a lot of crunch in numbers, because a half a gallon can make a difference. One gallon, one mile per gallon, can make a huge difference in their paycheck going home, where they can save money. So what, what do we do? What do our owner operators spend? You think, Corey in fuel well,
Corey Huey 08:26
so I actually cheated on that and looked at a few. But the 1090, nines are out, by the way, for the 2024, so I went through and just kind of randomly picked a few owner operators. And I mean, you know, I had wide ranges, but, I mean, I saw anywhere from, you know, 47,000 on the low end, up to 74,000 on the high end, split
Jeremy Kellett 08:52
74,000 individual fuel in
Megan Cummings 08:54
one year. Yep. Do they get to? Is that any kind of like a tax deductible thing? Yeah, for a driver, okay,
Jeremy Kellett 09:01
all expenses, yeah, not for you. Don’t try to put that on your Texas. We didn’t get that Megan,
Corey Huey 09:08
Well, yeah, that’s, you know. So going
Jeremy Kellett 09:09
back to your original point, I mean, how many miles did you look up? How many miles did they have? No, I
Corey Huey 09:14
mean, I would say 110, probably to on the on the higher side and on the lower one, it was like 70,000 miles maybe, you know, so,
Jeremy Kellett 09:24
yeah, so it just depends on what you’re doing. So I think the point of it is that fuel is expensive, and it’s a huge cost of these owner operators, absolutely, and we have to, we don’t have to, but we try to help them, you know, save money on fuel base that they can by giving discounts, yeah, how many gallons? Was that? Too many gallons. And always gonna ask Megan,
Megan Cummings 09:47
this, wouldn’t it, yeah? Oh, goody. Another question,
Jeremy Kellett 09:52
Was it gonna be the yearly? Yeah? How many gallons is cheating? How many gallons a month or or a year? Year do you think our owner operators bought how many gallons of fuel did 900 owner operators buy in a year’s time? Okay, what
Megan Cummings 10:09
did I just say a second ago for a week, 675,
Jeremy Kellett 10:13
and you guys said that was money, though this is gallons. I was talking about
Megan Cummings 10:17
gallons. Oh, you are okay. Okay. Was I close? Yeah,
Jeremy Kellett 10:20
Well, not really, okay, but you were good. It was close. Closer
Megan Cummings 10:25
In a year, how many gallons? Yep, everybody all on Robin, plus purchased. Oh, I can make myself sound really, really stupid right now.
Jeremy Kellett 10:39
Well, maybe it’s not an easy question. It’s not, it’s not an easy question. Nobody probably is getting this
Megan Cummings 10:46
900 so I’m gonna say, Yes, spit it up. Okay, I’m gonna say I just don’t want this to end up on TikTok. You could, really,
Jeremy Kellett 10:56
you could be a genius if you got it right. Okay, but it’s obvious now that you’re guessing.
Megan Cummings 11:01
Well, maybe there’s no math involved. I didn’t want anybody to think I was cheating, so I have to, okay, I’m gonna say, I’m gonna say, is it upwards of a million? I mean, obviously, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. I’m gonna say 2.5 good
Jeremy Kellett 11:14
guess mill So, and that’s wrong, but Corey has the numbers I know we do about a million or 1.2 a month.
Corey Huey 11:25
So total for the year of 2024 we total gallons, 13,781,892
Jeremy Kellett 11:36
13 million gallons in a year’s time bought by our owner operators, that is a, what’s that equivalent to the money wise.
Corey Huey 11:43
Money wise 43,000,040
Jeremy Kellett 11:46
$3 million spent on fuel by our owner operators. In 2024
Megan Cummings 11:52
Is there kind of like a median that it stays around? Or does it just fluctuate because the price of fuel fluctuates? Or like, is there like, a like? Normally, we stay around this number. Normally, from year to year, as far as fuel goes,
Jeremy Kellett 12:08
no, as far as the price, no. I mean, it fluctuates, but the gallons, yes, yes. Or long as you know, we stay around 900 you game trucks, you gonna get a little bit more. You have more freight one month, and you do the other then it’s more. But you know, 13 million gallons in a year’s time, that $43 million worth of fuel that just our own, this company, yeah, spent is amazing. And it just goes to tell you, show you how much, how important fuel is. So saving money on fuel, getting fuel discounts. I mean, all this plays a part. We have, you know, everybody out there on our operators got tips and what they do to save money on fuel. We’re gonna get to some of that later, but I was wanting to get the fuel discounts next. Corey, what do you got? You got something?
Corey Huey 12:55
Well, I was just gonna, I was just gonna say, you know, good segue into fuel discount. So, you know, our average discount for last year was 57 cents a gallon for the whole fleet. So, you know, pretty, pretty good. And you translate that into the 13 point 7 million gallons that we bought. I mean, you know, I figured that up as our how much money our owner operator saved was $7.8 million in fuel savings with that discount.
Jeremy Kellett 13:28
So that’s a lot of money, absolutely so. And for people to, I guess, understand well, how did you get discounts? How did discounts come about? So, you know, because this is something that was worked on long and hard to get on our operator’s discount. So all these major truck stops, whether it’s lust pilot, find J petrol and best locations, Road Ranger, I mean, all of these out there, we used to not give any discounts to an owner, operator, or company. You know why? Because we could not tell them. We can’t tell them where to fuel. So the fuel company was wanting, hey, I’ll give you a discount if you’ll send all your guys to love and like a company truck. You could do that. You could tell a guy where to go, owner operator, he fuels, wherever he wants to fuel. Yeah. Well, eventually they came around and they started giving us discounts. Love was one of the first ones that really gave us a good discount. And then the other ones followed. And it, you know, it takes some negotiating with the fuel stops to get it, but we pass all these fuel savings along to these owner operators, and they have offered, I mean, to average 50 cents a gallon for the whole year. It is a discount that is fantastic to be able to get. We have saved, helped save our owner operators seven over seven. Million dollars, right by negotiating these discounts with all the fuel stops. And does that just
Megan Cummings 15:06
apply automatically whenever they put their fuel card in? Yep, okay,
Jeremy Kellett 15:09
and that’s that’s been a, just been such a great tool. I don’t think the company’s enough. You know, all the truck stops and people that give Oakley owner operators discounts. It’s just been a huge help. And you start figuring that, especially on your weekly settlement, how much it saves you, yeah? Oh yeah. Add up a lot, yeah. I
Corey Huey 15:28
I mean, you know, and I was talking to the new guys this morning, you know, I go in there every week and orientation and give them their fuel card and just kind of go over some of this stuff with them. And that’s, you know, that’s what I leave them with is, you know, take advantage of these fuel discounts. Because, I mean, you never know when they’re going to leave. But, I mean, you just think about, you know, if, if, every time you filled up, you got to hunt a gallon. That’s $50 you saved every time, you know, and that adds up over a week, a month or a year, you know, obviously. But how
Megan Cummings 15:58
Do they see where they get their fuel discounts? Is that like them, how can the drivers check to see which fuel stop gets them?
Corey Huey 16:04
Yeah, so, so there’s a couple ways. I mean, we have, you know, the trans Flow app that they have for all their logging, paperwork, scanning, all that. There’s a tab on there for fuel discounts, you know, and they can click on that and, and it’s, it basically just brings up, like a Google image of, you know, where they’re located. And then there’s just pins all over on the map of fuel stops, and they can click around and choose which one provides the best discount. So there’s that way. There’s the you know, fuel management program, the driver tool kit, where they can log in there and type in, you know, Kentucky or Tennessee or Georgia or whatever state, and they’ll pull up every fuel discount in that state to, you know, shop around and find the best fuel so there’s several ways that a driver can find the fuel discounts. Yeah. So
Megan Cummings 16:59
Okay, do we go and I guess you go over that with them in orientation when they come through.
Jeremy Kellett 17:04
Yeah. And you really got to pay attention to that, because, as I mentioned, I think, on the last podcast in the intro, that Pilot Flying J is changing some of their discounts at certain locations, right? Well, it’s, it’s hard for us to keep you updated on all that all the time. You really just need to pay attention that the trans Flow app or that website driver tool kit is accurate. Should be. We’ve had a few issues in the past, but it’s pretty accurate. And you really need to look because you may not know that Pilot Flying J gave you some better discounts. You don’t always just want to select, oh, I’m just sticking with this one because, I mean, I guess they’re all pretty comparable, but pretty close, yeah, but you still could, I mean, there’s can be a difference of 510 cents, you know, at some level. So it makes a difference on fuel, especially when you’re talking that much money. Corey, tell us about, did we have anything else we wanted to touch on that we covered the fuel discounts? Pretty good answer to all the questions we had. Okay, here’s the big thing: is fuel fraud that we’ve been battling? Yeah, and we don’t have to get in a ditch with it, too bad. And but I mean, it is something that is, is happening, what, every day, a couple
Corey Huey 18:20
times a week. Yeah, definitely a couple times every week. Tell
Jeremy Kellett 18:23
them what we mean when I say fuel fraud. So
Corey Huey 18:25
you know, the biggest what we hear from EFS is when you swap your card at a pump, and when you all notice this too, I’m sure I do, but if you go to a gas station or a truck stop and in the fuel pump, they’ve got like a little sticker across the slot, we the slot where you put it in, you know? And that’s like a safety seal, basically, where you say that hasn’t been tampered with, yeah, well, so somehow, or I don’t know how these scammers are doing this, and they’re very good at it, for one, but they’re putting these they call them skimmers on the pubs. Yeah. So whenever you swipe your card there at the truck stop, it’s capturing all your information off your card, and then they just transfer that to a dummy card, and then bam, now they’ve got your fuel going. So
Megan Cummings 19:22
it’s a big epidemic a couple years ago, and I still it’s like a knee jerk reaction every time I go to the gas pump. I always pull on it to make sure I can’t pull it off, and then I stick my guard in. Yeah. So
Corey Huey 19:35
You know, it’s no fault of our owner operator or any truck driver out there. I mean, you know that’s not something that you expect to happen or that you’re really looking forward to and that’s it’s hard to tell anyway, but you know when they do that, when they capture your information, well, then, then they’re charging fuel off your fuel card. And you know, that’s how, how this is happening. And I wish I would have. Got some numbers, but, you know, I would, I would say, man, just guessing, over the last year and a half, I mean, we’ve probably had 200,000 $200,000 in fuel fraud.
Megan Cummings 20:14
When they when something like that happens, are they alerted, or does it just go to you and you let them know?
Corey Huey 20:18
Well, so used to not, but, you know, we, we’ve kind of, you know, we’ve gotten with Eric and the IT department here at Oakley, and with the Fs, and kind of put some safety measures in place. And one thing that we’ve done is we’ve inserted a text feature so each when I set these fuel cards up for these owner operators, they’re all individually set up for that owner operator. So it’s under their truck number, their name, their phone number, all that stuff. So just like a major credit card or something like that that you have, any time your card shows activity or is charged, it sends a text message to the owner operator that says, you know, August or January 15, at 9:50am you got fuel at the loves in Dallas, Texas, or wherever the stop was and and so what I tell our owner operators is, if you if you just got fuel there, then I mean, you just disregard that tax and go back your day. But if you’re driving down the road, you’re in Oklahoma or Georgia, and you get Texas says you just got fuel in Dallas, Texas. Well, if you need to be picking up the phone and calling your dispatch or calling me, letting us know, so that you know, we can cancel that card, so that they’re gonna continue to get that yeah, that fraud on there yourself.
Megan Cummings 21:39
Okay, so if we get notified as well? Like, I mean, I know that they get a text message,
Corey Huey 21:46
yeah, so I don’t have any way of knowing unless they notify me. Okay,
Megan Cummings 21:50
so they need to call you and let you know, absolutely okay, yeah. And
Corey Huey 21:53
Then, you know, then that just, you know, chain reacts, or a long fraud paperwork that we have to fill out here at Oakley and turn that into EFS to get credited back for that. And then obviously we have to cancel the order operator’s fuel card when that happens, and issue them a new fuel card. So it, you know, it’s, it’s,
Jeremy Kellett 22:15
How does that work? I mean, they if they don’t have another fuel card, whereas if
Corey Huey 22:20
they don’t have another one, then, yeah, it can be tricky, you know. So a lot of times, I mean, we’ve had guys have to, you know, put it on their personal card, or, you know, write an EFS check for it, or something like that. Or, you know, we’ve even gone as far as to overnight fuel cars to a customer or something where a driver is headed to to kind of help in that aspect. But we started giving out two fuel cards now, so blank, our blank, or just a spare card, just, you know, I tell everybody how, you know, put this in your glove box or your permit book or something. It’s not activated. But, you know, if something happens to your current one, you always got this backup, you can call me and we can switch it over so that the main thing there is that you’re not missing out on any of these fuel discounts we just talked about, because you’re not getting those discounts. If you’re not using Oak Ridge EFS,
Jeremy Kellett 23:10
use your own personal card, right? Yeah, cost you a lot of money, like fuel fraud has been an ongoing battle with EFS and with the truck stop. So you’ve made a transition with these apps, right?
Corey Huey 23:26
Yeah, and so, I mean, there’s good and bad with anything. You know, this was something else. I was just talking with the new guys down there this morning in orientation. But so, you know, going back to what we were originally talking about, where they’re putting these skimmers on the pumps. So they tell us the best way to avoid fuel fraud is to avoid swiping the card. Well, how do you get fuel if you don’t swipe the card? Well, so you know all your truck stops now have a fuel app. So one thing that they told us is to use these fuel apps, and kind of how that works is you upload your card information on the app, which is a good thing, you know, in the event that you left your fuel card at home or it cracked and the back of the strip is scratched up, doesn’t want to work anymore. Well, you still got it on the app so you can activate the pump right there, off your phone, which is a great tool. So that avoids swiping the car all together. The downfall that we’ve seen, or the issue that we’ve been having is in the example I gave in orientation this morning, driver gets the app out, tries to activate the pump, gets up there, and for whatever reason, it doesn’t work, you know, and he’s having issues with it. So he walks inside, says, hey, you know, I’m trying to activate the pump. It’s not working. And the clerk says, well, just swap it here at the desk, you know, what pump are you on? Pump 17, okay. Swipes the car. She activates the pump. The driver goes out. It gets his fuel leaves, you know, thinking everything’s good and fine. Well, whenever he was on the app, he did a pre authorization to activate the pub. Oh, no, driver, whoever comes in behind him gets fuel on Oakley, owner, operator, yeah. So the issue that we’ve been having there is, you know, whenever they investigate that, they determine that they don’t care that our truck got the fuel or not. All they can see on their end is that we activated the pump, so it’s like they don’t know that they wouldn’t buy fuel for the truck behind them, or not. So, that’s kind of a down issue to the app.
Jeremy Kellett 25:47
So what does the owner operator need to do? Well, so, I mean, the majority of them are fine, yeah.
Corey Huey 25:53
Just so what I try to tell everybody is, you know, if you want to use the app, that’s fine, just be cautious of that scenario. If you try to activate the pub with the app and it’s not working, you need to go in there and tell the clerk, hey, I’m trying to use the app. It’s not working. They can log on there on the computer and cancel that pre authorization, or call me, you know, and I can get on there to cancel the preauthor. Oh, you can through Tom, through the Fs and do all that. So now I can’t do it at midnight or 1am obviously, but, but if you don’t do that, then you’re subject to that scenario that I just gave and then ultimately, you know, the driver is responsible for that charge, you know, I, I’ve had some tough conversations with drivers, you know, we, we know exactly where he is based on his geo tab, that he’s two and a half hours away driving down the road, so he physically can’t be getting fuel, but he ends up getting charged for it because he did a pre
Megan Cummings 26:59
so that authorization can last for that long? Oh, yeah. I had no idea that was like a vending machine thing, where eventually it just cancels your card
Corey Huey 27:08
out. Yeah. So there, you know, there’s pros and cons to all that stuff, but you know, just just be, is
Megan Cummings 27:14
there anything that they can do realistically to prevent fraud, or is it just kind of,
Jeremy Kellett 27:19
I think just what he said is, if you do a pre off realization for fuel, then you don’t need to go in and use your fuel card to make sure that’s canceled by either the truck stop canceling it or US canceling it, which I didn’t know we could do, but that’s good, because you don’t want to leave it hanging out there. If it didn’t for some reason, they say it didn’t work. And then you swipe your card, I mean, and pay attention to the text you get
Corey Huey 27:43
absolutely yes, that is the most important thing. We created
Jeremy Kellett 27:46
that through the IT department, as you said earlier, and that’s a has for your benefit as an owner operator, is to pay attention to that text that you get from fuel, and knowing that you did get that fuel? If you didn’t, you need to be calling us ASAP, for sure. And
Corey Huey 28:05
It works. I mean, most guys are pretty good about calling me, or Harrison, you know, saying, Hey, I just got this text. And occasionally we’ll have a scenario not to get too deep into this, but where, you know, a guy will get fuel, and then, for whatever reason, the truck stop loses the receipt or something. And then towards the end of the month, whatever they’re, you know, calculating their books, or whatever they’re, they’re like, Oh, hey, we forgot this. And then a charge gets sent through, basically, and a driver will get a text and say, man. It says, I just got fuel here, and I’m not there, and we’ll go back and look. And he was there two weeks ago. He just never got charged for it at that time, you know. So, so that happens occasionally, but,
Jeremy Kellett 28:50
and I don’t know that all our owner operators understand that the works off the geo tab,
Corey Huey 28:55
right? Yeah. So, that brings up another, another good point that we were talking about yesterday, Megan with the truck trades, you know, if you’re buying a new truck. So let’s say, example, you come here to the Oakley shop to get your, you know, wet kid or blower removed off your truck, because I’m going to trade this truck in in whatever city, and on your way to pick up your new truck, you need to get fuel, or you’ve picked up your new truck, and you’re coming back here to get that information or that equipment back on your truck, and you need fuel prior to all that happening, I need to know that you’re trading trucks because one another safety measure that we do besides this text feature is your geo tab is linked to your fuel card as well. You know that helps us with your fuel taxes and things like that, on knowing how many miles you ran, all that stuff. But it also, as far as the safety feature goes, pings your location. So if you. If you’re trying to get fuel here in North, Little Rock at the lows, or the pilot here in North, little rocket, it pings the truck stop location, and then it pings the geo tab in your truck location. And if those two aren’t within a close proximity, it doesn’t allow your fuel car
Megan Cummings 30:17
to work. Okay, see, I always thought it went off your truck number no that goes off your geo tab.
Corey Huey 30:21
So what that means is, if you’re in a new truck, you don’t have a geo tab in your truck yet. Or if you’re taking your old truck to go pick up your new truck, we’ve taken that geo tab out so I can go in there and do like an override to where you can get fuel. But I just need to know that prior to you know, you leaving to go get your truck so and
Jeremy Kellett 30:44
I’m not sitting at the fuel pump. Think ahead, right? Think ahead. Okay, okay, fuel at the yard. We wanted to mention real quick fuel at the yard. We were talking a little bit about that yesterday.
Corey Huey 30:58
Yeah. So we’ve got three pumps here in our yard, two diesel pumps and a death pump. We try to set that fuel price on a daily basis, I guess, based on the fuel prices here in North LoRa, the love, I believe you know, so discounted price. So your fuel card works here, just like it does any other fuel stop. You’ll swipe your card here and enter your information, and bam, you get
Jeremy Kellett 31:29
Oakley fuel. So yeah, and that Oakley fuel not to go to depth, but you know, we just have to purchase that just like a truck stop does. We don’t have fuel here in the yard. We used to have some, but not anymore, so we just have to buy it, you know, just like everybody else does, but it’s good fuel. And to try to get busy over there, yeah, yeah, we try to give the best discounts we can. We can’t compete with these big guys, and they don’t like love and stuff. But anyway, we try to give our guys the best discount we possibly can. Which I’m gonna, I was gonna touch a little bit on fuel taxes, but I’m taking that off the board. I ain’t gonna mess with that. I was gonna make it on the spot again. Oh no. But I, what I do want to do is finish up with some of these comments, yeah, that we got now last episode, we actually put out the question, we said, Annabelle, put out the question of your favorite truck stop and why? Well, then yesterday, we had a little quick little meeting on this episode, and we decided to change that to, what is your fuel mileage, or similar, in that, what would you put out? Corey, what kind of
Corey Huey 32:38
fuel? Yeah, you know, what are things that you do to improve it out there? Yeah. So
Jeremy Kellett 32:42
We’ve got some responses that this is Megan’s favorite part of the show. Yes, to read some responses of what, what is your fuel mileage, and what are some things you do to get better fuel mileage? And then that other question about the truck stops. We’re going to get to that in the next episode. So we’ll get it, we’ll cover that too. We
Megan Cummings 32:59
should really have some kind of like a little song or jingle for the comment section.
Jeremy Kellett 33:04
Well, you can, you got something, you can whistle or sound anything like that. Now,
Megan Cummings 33:10
you’ll give me a couple. You’d work on the Yeah, you don’t
Jeremy Kellett 33:13
like the deal that comes in breaking news. Yeah, there’s Megan with the comment section. Yeah,
Megan Cummings 33:19
We Yeah. That’s what it’s called. That’s what we should call it, the comment section. I think that is really good. Okay, I have one on here. I want to read Tony’s because I have a story about that. Here’s something that I didn’t realize. So when you live in your truck, until you go home, and I know this makes me sound really silly, but until I started working here, it just never, was never something that I thought about. But if it’s hot outside, if it’s cold outside, you want it to be cool or warm in your truck while you’re asleep, and you have to at least take what is it? 10 hours, 10 hours. So I never knew that you weren’t supposed to idle. And I guess that’s where an APU comes in correctly. Okay, so a lot of these answers we’re talking about. One guy said, I’ve never let my truck idle overnight. Once. This guy said, never idle overnight. He’s got a Honda generator. So I guess, what app do you use whenever? What does that leave out a good question.
Jeremy Kellett 34:19
So an APU not to get AP, you can operate off diesel fuel, and there are some electric, okay, you know battery AP use out there too. There’s a lot of, there’s, there’s a variety of AP use out there. But, you know, that is the goal is, because you compare fuel and what it costs, and we talked about that earlier, and how expensive fuel can be so you can imagine running your truck for 10 hours, yeah, and idling and using, you know, when these guys will have it down to signs of what it cost them to run, you know, fuel for 10 hours and compared to if I had an APU that cost this amount of money on my truck. I could save this and this APU, you know, was designed to pay for it. So, okay, pretty quick. So an APU is definitely a so you’re
Megan Cummings 35:08
still using a diesel, just not that much, not near, yeah, okay, okay, got it, got it.
Jeremy Kellett 35:13
And then the guy that says the generator, you know, he’s using gas, so he’s having somehow filled that thing up with gas. Interesting,
Megan Cummings 35:20
Here’s one. Okay, so Tony Hollingsworth says, run red fuel. It’s a lot cheaper, so mileage isn’t as big of an issue. And I was listening, listening, I was I was listening, or I was looking through these comments yesterday, and I was like, Why is everybody laughing at it? And I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know if that was just a better brand of fuel. Google says that that’s what you put in, like a regular truck, like, not, not like an on the road vehicle, right off road,
Corey Huey 35:51
yes, yeah, for tractors. So I just
Megan Cummings 35:54
I wanted to let everyone know that now I know what that means. I didn’t know what it was before. And I’m like, Why is everybody laughing at it? I don’t get it. He’s just trying to give you a good, helpful piece of advice. Tony’s a character. Thanks Tony. Um, what else do we have? Well, boost under 20 psi when possible. Why don’t you explain
Jeremy Kellett 36:13
That is exactly the reason, and this is what I was looking for. Some of them, like Frank races, he’s getting 7.7 miles per gallon. That’s really good. We were talking to Alex here the other day. He traded trucks, you know, and he was, he was getting seven, I forgot what he said, Seven and a half right in there on this truck. And he is, he’s detailed Exactly. And with this new one, he has spec that he helps to get over eight miles per gallon. Now, that is, that’s how you make money, yeah. And then, of course, he, you know, a lot of these guys drive, you know. This one says he, you know, I drive slow. Keep my after treatment clean, don’t idle. That was Frank. And
Megan Cummings 36:58
That’s kind of, I mean, I know that people just assume that when you’re talking about speed, you’re talking about safety, but when you keep your speeds down, it sounds like you can save a lot of money. Yeah, you know you
Jeremy Kellett 37:08
definitely can, when you can, if you would go from 80 to 65 on your way to work, you would be amazed. You probably get another day. Elliot, well, I guess we’ll just
Megan Cummings 37:17
never know, will we? So keeping your speed down and after, after, not after treatment, fuel treatment. That’s like what we talked about with last
Jeremy Kellett 37:29
year, yeah, yeah, that’s right, we sure did. I talked a little bit about attitudes that a lot of guys use, yeah, for sure. And that helps, I think, a lot too. But you know, tire pressure is one that you have to take in consideration. Just so much can go into it. I mean, the type of truck you buy, whether it’s a, you know, maybe a square hood or an aerodynamic hood on the front. I mean, there’s just so many things to weigh in here and to get better fuel mileage, with that being the biggest expense that an owner operator has, I know they try everything to get better fuel mileage, save $1 money in their pocket, more money every week. So absolutely. Good comments, good comments, good episodes. Anything else we need to add? I feel like we covered plenty, really, a lot of information in this episode concerning fuel but you know, our own operators. I hope you go back and listen to this. You might have to listen to it a couple times, especially on the fuel fraud, stuff that we need you to pay attention to, because we don’t want that to happen too,
Corey Huey 38:36
right? Yeah, if you have any questions or issues, I mean, yeah, definitely don’t hesitate. Reach out to me. Yeah, if
Jeremy Kellett 38:43
you got questions on this stuff that we didn’t because we didn’t cover everything, I mean, we, you know, hit the high spots here. But if you have questions on anything concerning this episode, put it in the comments. Call us up here, ask us. We want to make sure we get all your questions answered. Yes. All right. Anything else? Good, good. Okay. Megan, get ready for the dentist. All right. Thanks for listening to everybody on the Oakley podcast. We appreciate y’all every week for sure, and stay tuned. We got some great episodes coming up in the future. So once again, we appreciate it. We’ll talk to you next week. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode with Oakley podcast, trucking, business and family. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate or review the show and the podcast platform of your choice and share it with a friend. We love hearing from our audience. So if you’ve got a question comment or just want to say hello, head over to our website, the Oakley podcast.com and click the leave a comment button. We’ll get you a response soon, and may even share some of the best ones here on the show. We’ll be back with a fresh episode very soon. Thanks for listening.