Insights from ATRI’s Latest Report: How Fleets Are Fighting Back Against Rising Costs & Tight Margins

Jeff Lynch
July 2, 2025
5 minutes read

For heavy-duty trucking fleets, navigating the current economic climate feels like walking a tightrope. The latest American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) report on operational costs paints a clear picture: while fuel prices offered some relief in 2024, decreasing by 13.0%, the overall operational costs, excluding fuel, actually rose by a significant 3.6%. This isn’t just a fleeting trend; this upward pressure on non-fuel expenses is continuing into Q1 2025, quietly eroding profitability. Download the report here.

The consequences are stark. The ATRI report highlights that the truckload sector, a major segment of our industry, averaged a negative operating margin of -2.3% in 2024. This alarming figure signals that for many fleets, the cost of doing business is simply outpacing revenue. In an environment where every penny counts and profitability is elusive, the battle for the bottom line extends far beyond just monitoring fuel prices.

The Invisible Profit Drains: What ATRI’s Report Reveals

The ATRI report illuminates several key areas where fleets are consistently losing money, even when the fuel gauge offers a brief respite:

Soaring Equipment Costs: Truck and trailer payments saw the largest increase in 2024, climbing 8.3% to a new record high. This trend continued into Q1 2025, with another 3.9% increase. These significant capital investments demand that every truck operates at peak efficiency to justify its cost.
Creeping Maintenance Burdens: While overall Repair & Maintenance (R&M) costs dipped slightly in 2024, they are already on the rise again in Q1 2025, projected to increase by 2.8%. Unplanned repairs are profit killers, leading to costly shop time and direct revenue loss.
Operational Inefficiencies You Can Control: Deadhead (empty) mileage increased to 16.7% of total mileage in 2024, representing wasted fuel and lost opportunities. Average dwell times remained high at 1 hour 38 minutes per stop, directly impacting driver productivity and schedules.
Rising Driver Retention Costs: Attracting and keeping top talent is expensive. Driver benefits costs increased by 4.8% in 2024, and driver retention bonuses jumped by a remarkable 42.1%, underscoring the high investment required to maintain a skilled workforce.

For fleets to genuinely “fight back” against negative margins, they must gain control over these complex, interconnected expenses and inefficiencies. The strategy moves beyond just reducing fuel; it’s about optimizing every facet of the operation to maximize profitability.

Idle Smart: Your Comprehensive Solution for Cost Control

At Idle Smart, we specialize in delivering the actionable control and cost savings that today’s heavy-duty fleets desperately need. We understand that in a market with razor-thin, or even negative, operating margins, our solutions aren’t just “nice-to-haves”—they’re essential tools for survival and growth.

Our integrated system tackles these profit drains from multiple angles:

Transforming Idle into Immediate Fuel Savings: Our core Idle Smart system delivers true idle reduction. It automatically manages engine runtime based on actual needs, ensuring the engine runs only when necessary. This intelligent automation is proven to cut idle fuel costs by 30-50%. These are immediate, measurable savings that directly offset rising non-fuel expenses, impacting your fuel budget day one.
Slashing Downtime & Maintenance Costs with Predictive Power: Unplanned breakdowns are a direct hit to profitability. Idle Smart’s SmartInsights solution provides AI-powered predictive maintenance alerts, identifying critical issues like DPF Regen problems, low coolant levels, or DEF dosing unit faults before they escalate into costly roadside repairs or engine derates. By preventing these emergencies, we boost your uptime, keeping your trucks on the road and generating revenue.
Extending Asset Life & Protecting Investments: With truck and trailer payments at record highs, protecting these valuable assets is paramount. By minimizing unnecessary engine runtime through intelligent idle reduction, Idle Smart significantly reduces engine wear and tear. This prolongs engine life and reduces long-term maintenance needs, helping to preserve your substantial capital investment. Our Battery Protect feature also eliminates costly battery drain and no-start issues, while Cold Start Guard proactively prevents cold start failures and fuel gelling, ensuring reliable operation in any condition. These functions are entirely hands-free and automatic.
Empowering Drivers for Better Retention & Productivity: Driver comfort directly impacts job satisfaction and retention. Idle Smart’s Cabin Comfort feature allows drivers to set their ideal in-cab temperature via the display, ensuring a comfortable environment for restful sleep. While the driver controls the temperature settings, the system works automatically to maintain that comfort without excessive idling. This enhanced well-being contributes to driver loyalty, indirectly reducing the costly burden of recruitment and training.
Unparalleled Visibility & Control via the SmartPortal: The SmartPortal is your fleet’s command center. It provides real-time data on fuel savings, idle hours saved, and alerts from SmartInsights. More importantly, it offers granular control over idle settings and provides proactive insights. This transparent data empowers your team to make informed, data-backed decisions that directly impact profitability and efficiency across your entire operation.

The ATRI report is not just a collection of numbers; it’s a critical call to action. In a challenging market where every penny truly counts, the fleets that adapt and leverage smart technology to control costs and optimize operations are the ones that not only survive but thrive.

Idle Smart can make your fleet more profitable by targeting the core expenses that dictate your financial success. Talk to our team of experts today to learn how.

The True Cost of a Failed Inspection

A brake-related out-of-service violation during brake week is more than an inconvenience; it’s a multi-faceted financial hit:

Immediate Revenue Halt: A sidelined truck isn’t hauling freight. Every hour it’s parked for violations is revenue lost, disrupting schedules, and impacting customer commitments. CVSA mandates: “Commercial motor vehicles found to have brake-related out-of-service violations… will be removed from roadways until those violations are corrected”.
Emergency Repair Expenses: Rushed roadside repairs, towing fees, and expedited parts purchases are significantly more costly than planned maintenance. These emergency hits erode your carefully managed margins.
Driver Dissatisfaction & Turnover: Drivers value reliable equipment. Constant battles with unpredictable truck issues or the stress of failed inspections contribute to burnout and higher turnover rates in an already tight labor market.
Reputational Damage: Delays stemming from compliance issues can strain customer relationships and tarnish your fleet’s reputation for reliability.

Check out CVSA’s 2025 Brake Inspection Checklist.

Idle Smart: Your Strategic Edge for Brake Week & Beyond

Idle Smart equips your fleet with intelligent solutions that extend beyond the pressure of Brake Week, building driver confidence and operational reliability that lasts all year.

1. Predictive Insights to Prevent Brake Surprises

You can’t fix what you don’t see. Most fleets rely on reactive maintenance, only addressing issues once they’ve escalated or triggered a warning light. SmartInsights fundamentally changes this, catching potential issues before they lead to breakdowns.

Beyond Basic Diagnostics: SmartInsights, Idle Smart’s predictive maintenance solution analyzes complex ECM data to filter out noise and highlight potential issues before they become critical failures. This proactive approach helps your team identify subtle problems that traditional methods miss.
Targeting Hidden Vulnerabilities: While CVSA’s Operation Airbrake emphasizes physical components like drums and rotors, modern brake systems are complex, with electronic faults potentially impacting overall performance. SmartInsights provides critical, early warnings for issues such as Anti-Lock Braking (ABS) faults. Catching these system-level problems proactively ensures your entire braking system is functioning optimally, boosting your readiness for inspections and minimizing safety risks.

The Benefit: Your maintenance team gains critical visibility, allowing them to schedule and address issues like ABS faults during planned downtime. This prevents overloading your technicians with reactive, expensive emergency repairs caused by unexpected inspection failures during Brake Week.

2. Uptime Assurance: Ensuring Trucks Are Ready, Always

Idle Smart’s core features ensure confident drivers and consistent operations, not just during inspections, but throughout the entire year, freeing your team to focus on strategic maintenance instead of constant firefighting.

No-Start Prevention: Our Battery Protect™ feature precisely monitors battery voltage, automatically starting the engine to recharge before voltage drops too low, ensuring your drivers aren’t stranded or delaying pre-trip inspections due to dead batteries.
Engine & Fuel Line Safeguard: Cold Start Guard™ continuously monitors coolant temperatures, automatically starting the engine when needed to prevent costly cold start failures and fuel gelling. A healthy engine is fundamental to a compliant vehicle, reducing overall system strain that could indirectly impact brake performance.

The Benefit: By preventing the most common causes of unplanned downtime—battery drain and cold start issues—Idle Smart ensures your trucks are available for thorough brake inspections and ready for dispatch. This core reliability directly contributes to a fleet that passes inspections with confidence.

3. Data-Driven Preparedness via the SmartPortal

Effective compliance isn’t guesswork; it’s informed strategy. The SmartPortal is your command center for this data, giving you a clear picture of your idle and truck activity, from an individual truck to your entire fleet.

Holistic Health Overview: The SmartPortal gives you a clear picture of your fleet’s idling and drivers’ use of the system. Tools in the SmartPortal, like the Utilization Score (U-Score) and Truck Activity, highlight system use and driver behavior, helping you easily identify top performers, operational anomalies like excessive idling, and critical data like key position at any time of the day.
Strategic Action: The SmartPortal helps fleets find hidden trends and Insights to boost efficiency, ensuring systemic issues that might impact brake health, or any other critical component, are addressed before they become costly emergencies.

The Benefit: You gain the confidence of knowing your fleet’s status, enabling proactive maintenance scheduling and resource allocation. This strategic oversight ensures comprehensive readiness for Brake Week and consistent compliance every other week of the year.

The Executive ROI: Turning Compliance into a Competitive Advantage

Investing in Idle Smart’s proactive approach delivers measurable financial returns:

Maximized Uptime & Revenue: By preventing no-starts, cold start failures, and unexpected maintenance flagged by SmartInsights, Idle Smart ensures trucks remain on the road generating revenue and avoiding costly detours to the shop or roadside.

CVSA Data Insight: While 8.7% of commercial vehicles faced out-of-service orders during CVSA’s 2025 Unannounced Brake Safety Day and 13% during the 2024 Brake Week, Idle Smart helps position your fleet among the majority that consistently pass.

Reduced Operational Costs: Proactive maintenance minimizes expensive emergency repairs and extends the lifespan of high-value assets like engines and batteries.
Enhanced Driver Morale: Drivers appreciate reliable equipment and predictable schedules. Reducing their stress translates to higher job satisfaction and improved retention, which is more important now than ever.
Stronger Reputation: A fleet known for consistent reliability and proactive safety measures attracts top talent and fosters stronger, more dependable customer relationships.

Confidence on the Road, Every Day

Brake Week is more than just an annual check-up; it’s a magnifying glass on your fleet’s fundamental operational health. By investing in Idle Smart, you’re not just preparing for one week of inspections. You’re building a foundation of reliability, efficiency, and proactive management that benefits your drivers and your bottom line, every single day.

Ready to transform your fleet’s Brake Week experience into a confident stride toward year-round operational excellence?

Schedule a Meeting Today!

The Technicians’ Secret Weapon for Brake Week 2025

Ace Brake Week 2025. Equip your technicians with time-saving tools...

The pressure is on for heavy-duty trucking fleets navigating a tight, uncertain market. That intensity escalates further with CVSA’s Brake Week 2025, part of Operation Airbrake, from August 24-30. This isn’t just an annual inspection; it’s a stress test that mercilessly exposes systemic maintenance vulnerabilities, especially when teams are already short-staffed.

In this demanding environment, your maintenance technicians are the unsung heroes of your fleet, indispensable for uptime, revenue, and reputation. Yet, they face an escalating workload, often compounded by a persistent technician shortage. They are constantly asked to “do more with less.” Reactive repairs and diagnostic guesswork are no longer just inefficient; they are catastrophic to profitability in this demanding market.

Idle Smart is the strategic partner that empowers your existing maintenance team to tackle a demanding market and high-stakes events like Brake Safety Week with confidence, fundamentally reducing their burden and enabling them to do more with fewer resources.

Brake Week 2025: The Squeeze on Your Shop Floor

Technicians are always under pressure, but events like Brake Safety Week amplify existing challenges.

The ongoing industry-wide technician shortage means every hour wasted by existing staff due to inefficiency or unnecessary tasks directly impacts your bottom line. This leads to the hidden costs of reactive maintenance:

Time-Consuming Guesswork: The absence of precise, early data forces technicians into time-consuming, expensive “guessing games” to pinpoint problems, wasting valuable labor hours and tying up crucial bay space.
Unforeseen Failures: Surprise breakdowns, often exacerbated or uncovered during inspections like Brake Safety Week, lead to massive, unplanned revenue loss.
Burnout & Turnover: The relentless cycle of reactive repairs, emergency calls, and high-pressure compliance checks contributes directly to technician burnout and costly turnover.

CVSA Data: The threat of being sidelined is constant. 8.7% of vehicles inspected during 2025 Brake Safety Day and 13% during 2024 Brake Safety Week were placed out-of-service due to brake-related violations. These statistics directly illustrate constant, avoidable revenue stoppages caused by reactive maintenance.

Idle Smart: Doing More with Less Through Prevention

Idle Smart’s core system directly eases the maintenance burden on your team by preventing common, costly failures that typically consume significant technician time and resources. This empowers them to manage a larger workload with the same or even fewer people.

Idle Smart helps in preventing costly failures before they happen, significantly reducing the maintenance burden:

Reduced Wear from Idling: Idle Smart’s fundamental purpose is reducing unnecessary engine idling. This directly reduces wear on critical parts (like DPFs, starters, alternators, and engine components), leading to fewer general repairs over the truck’s lifespan. Technicians spend less time on routine component replacements and repairs caused by excessive idle, extending maintenance intervals and freeing up their capacity.
No More Dead Batteries: Idle Smart’s Battery Protect™ precisely monitors battery voltage, automatically starting the engine to recharge before voltage drops too low. This prevents dead batteries, eliminating emergency roadside calls, freeing technicians from reactive jump-starts, and saving valuable shop time that would otherwise be spent on battery-related issues.
Eliminating Cold Start Damage: Cold Start Guard™ continuously monitors coolant temperatures, automatically starting the engine when needed to prevent costly cold start failures and fuel gelling. This directly reduces engine strain and technician workload associated with cold-weather-induced damage.

The SmartPortal for Foundational Command: The SmartPortal (included with every system) offers granular visibility into critical fleet activity. It allows technicians to quickly understand truck usage patterns, verify system operations, and access vital data like U-Score (Utilization Score) and Truck Activity to improve initial triage and reduce wasted diagnostic time. This provides essential context beyond raw numbers, highlighting operational anomalies and key positions at any time of the day..

Our SmartPortal can help your technicians breeze through Brake Week 2025.

Advanced Tools for Peak Efficiency: SmartInsights & Smart+

Idle Smart’s add-on solutions equip your team with advanced capabilities, enabling them to maximize efficiency and proactively manage fleet health.

SmartInsights: The Maintenance Team’s Force Multiplier: SmartInsights analyzes complex ECM data, filtering out noise to highlight and prioritize critical ECM faults and emerging patterns. It gives technicians precise, actionable insights into issues like Anti-Lock Braking (ABS) faults, Low Coolant Level, or EGR Valve Issues before they escalate.
Smart+: This suite provides automated solutions for an even lighter maintenance burden. SmartSet automatically adjusts critical truck parameters based on real-time weather and location, preventing unnecessary wear. SmartSecure offers discreet location tracking, protecting assets technicians work hard to maintain.

Easing the Maintenance Burden with Idle Smart

Today’s maintenance teams operate under immense pressure, often feeling overwhelmed by a relentless cycle of unexpected repairs and stretched resources. Continuing with a reactive approach is simply no longer sustainable for your bottom line.

Providing your technicians with Idle Smart isn’t just an expense; it’s a strategic investment in their capacity and your fleet’s resilience. It fundamentally transforms their daily work, shifting from constant firefighting to proactive management.

A healthier, more efficient maintenance team directly translates to maximized uptime, significantly reduced operational costs, and a more resilient fleet that confidently meets all compliance demands, including Brake Week. Don’t let the maintenance burden hold your fleet back. Empower your team and transform your operations.

Talk to our team today!

Why Predictive Maintenance Is Your Fleet’s Best Friend

Learn how your fleet can prevent breakdowns, cut costs, and...

For decades, fleet maintenance was either reactive or preventive. Something broke, and you fixed it, or you scheduled routine service across your vehicles, hoping to prevent issues before they started. Both approaches have limits, leading fleets to move to a third, smarter model: Predictive Maintenance.

Reactive maintenance means waiting until a battery dies or a sensor fails before taking action, leading to unplanned downtime and unexpected costs. Preventive maintenance can reduce those surprises, but it often applies one-size-fits-all service intervals to assets with very different usage patterns. That adds cost without always delivering value.

Rather than responding to failure or working from fixed schedules, predictive maintenance uses real-time data to flag issues early. It helps you intervene before a part fails, based on how and where that vehicle is operating. The result is less downtime, lower spend, and more confident planning across the board.

Reactive vs. Predictive: What’s the Difference?

Reactive maintenance is exactly what it sounds like. A problem happens, and your team scrambles to fix it. You’re already behind.

Preventive maintenance takes a more proactive approach, but it still relies on general timelines, not actual wear or conditions. You might service a battery that’s still healthy or miss signs of trouble on a truck that’s outside the normal cycle.

Predictive maintenance flips the script by using data like voltage trends, idle cycles, or cab temperature. It flags issues as they emerge, allowing your team to respond based on risk, not routine. It’s smarter, more targeted, and scalable across even the most complex fleets.

Why It Matters Now

This shift isn’t theoretical. It’s happening because the pressures on fleet operations are increasing, and traditional approaches can’t keep up.

Labor is tight. Techs are hard to find and harder to keep. Predictive maintenance helps your existing teams prioritize the work that matters most, rather than constantly playing catch-up.
Budgets are shrinking. With rising parts and labor costs, there’s less room for trial and error. Predictive insights help reduce emergency repairs and let you plan for shop time and inventory needs.
Downtime is costly. Whether you’re moving retail goods or industrial equipment, missed deliveries impact customer relationships. Predictive models minimize unplanned service and help protect your schedule.
Fleets are more complex. You’re not just managing a few identical trucks anymore. You’ve got assets across climates, regions, and use cases. Predictive tools let you service each vehicle based on actual conditions, not assumptions.

How the Smartportal and SmartInsights Make It Actionable

Idle Smart is purpose-built for enterprise-scale insight. Every subscription includes access to the SmartPortal and SmartInsights, our predictive maintenance tool that turns idle reduction data into real-world maintenance intelligence. That includes:

Image of SmartPortal Home page, the home of our predictive maintenance tool, SmartInsights.

Battery health analysis: Track voltage trends and spot early signs of battery decline before failure happens.
Understand engine cycling: See how often and under what conditions Idle Smart is engaging, fleet-wide or by vehicle.
Idle behavior insights: Detect unnecessary cycling tied to drivers or environments, so you can address usage and optimize performance.

These insights are accessible via the Smartportal and supported by a dedicated Customer Success Manager who helps translate insights into action, so your team gets clear, vehicle-specific guidance that aligns with your strategy.

Predictability Pays Off

One of the biggest values of predictive maintenance is the ability to plan, rather than react. When you can forecast potential failures, you can:

Schedule repairs during natural downtime
Avoid premium pricing on last-minute parts and labor
Reduce emergency service calls and out-of-route repairs
Keep vehicles and drivers on schedule

Predictability reduces friction for everyone, from shop teams to the executive suite. A maintenance lead might see fewer disruptions, an operations director might find opportunities to rebalance workloads, and a COO can gain confidence in uptime forecasts and SLA delivery.

Maintenance as a Strategic Lever

Historically, maintenance was treated as a cost center, but with the right data and tools, maintenance can directly support your fleet’s broader business goals:

Extend asset life by timing repairs based on actual wear
Reduce inventory waste through smarter part planning
Improve sustainability by reducing avoidable idling
Support driver retention by minimizing service-related delays

When your vehicles are operating in different regions, climates, and duty cycles, real-time visibility helps ensure that no truck gets under- or over-serviced.

Where Idle Smart Fits In

Idle Smart is a powerful piece of your maintenance toolkit, guiding your maintenance teams to the most critical repairs.

Your team gets ahead of potential failures, your assets stay healthier longer, and your operation runs with less risk. Because everything is centralized through the Smartportal, you can monitor trends across hundreds or thousands of vehicles in a single view, while still drilling down to the details that matter.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated

We know “predictive maintenance” can sound technical, especially if you’re already juggling multiple platforms and priorities. That’s why we keep it simple. Every Idle Smart subscription includes two SmartInsights reports per vehicle, plus hands-on support from your Customer Success Manager. You don’t need a data science team to make this work.

You need the right information, at the right time, in a format that makes sense. That’s what we deliver.

Let’s talk about how Idle Smart + SmartInsights can support your maintenance strategy and help your fleet move with greater control and confidence.

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Idle Smart’s fleet experts have the answers.