According to Foss National Leasing’s fleet cost analysis, fuel and maintenance represent roughly one-third of total fleet operating costs: fuel at 26% and maintenance at 10%. The remaining two-thirds (depreciation, insurance, interest, taxes, and licensing) are largely fixed. That one-third is the only portion of your fleet budget that responds directly to management decisions. It’s where the real opportunity sits.
Fuel waste rarely looks dramatic in the moment. A few extra idle hours per day, tires a few PSI short, drivers who accelerate hard out of every stop: none of it feels significant until you add it up across an entire fleet over a full year.
The same logic works in reverse. Small, consistent improvements across five areas produce real budget savings. Here’s where to focus.
1. Driver Behaviour Drives More Fuel Spend Than Most Managers Realize
How your drivers handle a vehicle directly and measurably impacts fuel consumption. Hard acceleration, abrupt braking, unnecessary idling, speeding, and aggressive cornering all increase fuel consumption. According to Natural Resources Canada, these behaviours can increase fuel consumption by as much as 25%.
On a fleet of 20 vehicles, a 25% reduction in fuel waste from behaviour changes alone is a substantial budget improvement. It doesn't require new vehicles or infrastructure. It requires better data and a plan to act on it.
The most effective approach pairs monitoring with coaching. Telematics systems give you real-time data on how drivers are actually behaving on the road, not how you assume they are. That makes coaching conversations specific and actionable rather than general and easy to dismiss.
Pair monitoring with a structured training program. Short, targeted modules that address specific problem behaviours (distracted driving, speeding, harsh braking) produce better results than one-off sessions. Driver abstract reporting helps flag ongoing issues before they become patterns.
Better driving habits reduce fuel costs, lower accident rates, and bring down insurance premiums. The return compounds well beyond the fuel line.
2. A Fleet Card Helps Reduce Fuel Waste and Improve Cost Control
If your drivers are fuelling up with personal credit cards or single-brand fuel cards, you’re giving up both price flexibility and spend visibility. A fleet card program addresses both.
Price flexibility matters more than it looks. When drivers are locked into one vendor’s network, they’ll sometimes drive several minutes out of their way to reach an approved station. On a 30-vehicle fleet, that detour costs an estimated $19,950 per year in lost productivity, based on Foss National Leasing’s fleet cost research. Access to 98% of Canadian gas stations eliminates that problem.
Spend controls are the other side of the equation. Transaction limits by driver, vehicle, or purchase type prevent runaway costs before they happen. Unauthorized purchases can account for up to 15% of total fleet fuel costs when left unchecked. Catching them early is the fastest way to recover budget without changing anything else about how your fleet operates.
What could the savings look like? Illustrative estimates: Based on Foss National Leasing's fleet cost model, using the current Canadian average fuel price of approximately $1.45/litre and 372 litres per vehicle per month, a 10-vehicle fleet saves approximately $11,508 per year by implementing a fleet card. A 20-vehicle fleet saves around $23,016. A 50-vehicle fleet saves approximately $57,540. Those figures combine fuel fraud prevention (15% of fuel spend) with VMT maintenance screening savings of $60 per call.
Actual savings will vary by fleet size, fuel type, province, and driving patterns.
3. How Preventive Maintenance Improves Fleet Fuel Efficiency
A well-maintained fleet uses less fuel. The gaps are easy to miss, and they add up quietly.
Tire pressure is one of the most overlooked factors. According to Consumer Reports, under-inflation reduces fuel economy by 0.3% for every 1 PSI drop across all four tires. Tires lose one to two PSI per month naturally, so without a maintenance schedule, this problem quietly compounds.
If your fleet operates in a climate with real winters, and most Canadian fleets do, make sure drivers switch back to all-season or summer tires when conditions allow. Winter tires mean more rolling resistance and more fuel consumed when roads are clear and dry.
For vehicles with high annual mileage, low-rolling-resistance tires are worth evaluating. They reduce fuel consumption without meaningful trade-offs in safety or performance.
Regular preventive maintenance, including fluid checks, air filter replacements, and fuel system servicing, keeps engines running efficiently. Deferred maintenance doesn’t just create repair costs; it creates a slow, steady decline in fuel economy that most fleets absorb without tracking.
Managed maintenance programs, where a technician screens repair requests against vehicle history before authorizing work, prevent unnecessary charges. That kind of oversight typically saves around $60 per call on maintenance spend.
4. How Route Planning Lowers Fleet Fuel Consumption
Your drivers can’t always avoid traffic, but with the right tools, they can spend significantly less time sitting in it.
GPS-enabled route planning, through a telematics system or even a consumer navigation app, helps drivers avoid congestion, construction delays, and incidents in real time. Idle time is fuel consumed for zero kilometres. Reducing it has a direct and immediate effect on fuel spend.
Telematics data also gives you a fleet-wide view of idle time patterns. Drivers who consistently warm up vehicles beyond what conditions require, or wait at job sites with the engine running, are burning fuel that serves no operational purpose. Once you can see the pattern clearly, you can address it with policy and coaching.
For fleets with planned routes and defined service territories, route optimization tools can reduce total daily distance across the fleet. The fuel savings scale directly with the reduction in kilometres driven.
5. When EVs Make Sense for Canadian Fleets
The business case for electric vehicles in the fleet has strengthened considerably. Some plug-in hybrid models now travel close to 100 km before drawing on the gasoline engine, which, for urban and suburban applications, means many drivers rarely use fuel during a normal workday. Long-range battery-electric vehicles now exceed 800 km on a single charge in some models.
Not every fleet is ready for a full electric transition today. Infrastructure, climate, payload requirements, and daily range vary significantly across fleet types and regions in Canada. The economics also depend heavily on which government rebate programs apply to your situation, as federal and provincial incentives can meaningfully offset higher upfront costs.
Piloting a small number of EVs or plug-in hybrids alongside your existing fleet is the most practical way to gather real-world data. It lets you identify which vehicle roles are genuinely well-suited to electrification before committing to a broader transition.
Putting It All Together
Each of these five areas produces real savings on its own. Driver coaching reduces fuel waste. Fleet cards eliminate unauthorized spend and consolidate reporting. Preventive maintenance keeps vehicles running at their most efficient. Route planning cuts idle time and unnecessary kilometres. A phased move toward lower-emission vehicles reduces your baseline consumption year over year.
The fleet managers we work with who see the biggest reductions aren't always the ones with the most sophisticated tools. They're the ones who applied a consistent strategy across all five areas and kept measuring the results.
How Foss National Can Help
Foss National Leasing works with Canadian fleet managers across all five of these areas. Our fleet card program covers spend controls, fraud detection, and consolidated invoicing. Our driver safety programs include telematics, driver abstract reporting, and RiskCOACH training. Our Vehicle Maintenance Team manages authorizations and vendor coordination across a network of over 20,000 service providers nationwide. And our ZEV program supports fleets through every phase of the transition to lower-emission vehicles.
If you'd like to see where your fleet's biggest fuel cost opportunities are, we're happy to walk through it with you.
Get to Know the Author
Dominic Riolo is Vendor Relations and Vehicle Maintenance Call Centre Manager at Foss National Leasing. A licensed mechanic with over 17 years of fleet experience, Dominic started in Foss's remarketing department and worked his way through the organization to his current role leading the VMT call centre — where he coaches and trains the technicians who screen maintenance authorizations for Canadian fleet operators every day. The fleet cost data and maintenance figures referenced in this article draw directly on that operational experience.
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