Fuel gets the attention, but it is rarely the biggest saving. Here are the six cost centres telematics touches, ranked by how reliably fleets actually recover money from each.
This is the one that surprises people, and in service fleets it is usually larger than fuel.
Telematics replaces self-reported arrival and departure times with times recorded by the vehicle. That matters in three ways: payroll accuracy, customer billing accuracy, and disputes. When a customer says nobody showed up on Tuesday, you have the answer in about eight seconds instead of a phone call to a driver who was on twelve jobs that week.
Nobody publishes a credible average for this, and we're not going to invent one. But if you bill hourly, work out what a single disputed half-day costs you and multiply by how often it happens.
Covered in detail in our article on [fuel spend](blog-how-fleet-gps-reduces-fuel-spend.html), but briefly:
Not the premium discount — the exposure.
The American Transportation Research Institute studied 600 trucking cases from 2006 to 2019 and found average verdict size growing **51.7% per year** between 2010 and 2018, against 1.7% general inflation. In the first five years of that database there were 26 cases over $1 million. In the last five, nearly 300.
Two findings from that study matter operationally:
Both point the same direction: evidence available early is worth more than evidence assembled late. The US Chamber Institute for Legal Reform puts the median nuclear verdict at **$21 million** across 2013–2022, and notes that six states produce about 61% of them — **Georgia among them**.
If you operate in Georgia, that is not an abstract risk.
Engine fault codes, battery voltage trends and actual odometer readings let you schedule maintenance on real use rather than on a calendar.
The mechanism worth understanding is voltage. A device logging battery voltage over time will show a battery degrading weeks before it strands a truck. That is a roadside call and a lost day avoided, and roadside costs several multiples of shop time.
ATRI put industry-average operating cost at **$2.336 per mile in 2025**, with repair and maintenance up 8.6% year over year — the highest in the report's history. Maintenance is getting more expensive faster than most other line items.
Cargo theft losses reached an estimated **$725 million in 2025** according to Verisk CargoNet — up about 60% year over year, with the average loss per theft climbing 36% to **$273,990**.
The detail worth noting: incident count was roughly flat (2,646 vs 2,243 confirmed thefts) while loss value rose 60%. Thieves shifted to higher-value targets rather than stealing more often.
Separately, Overhaul's 2025 data puts **Georgia at about 4%** of US cargo theft, with 36% of thefts occurring at warehouses and distribution centres and 17% at truck stops and fuel stations.
The least measurable and the most consistently reported: less time reconstructing where vehicles went, fewer phone calls to drivers asking for status, faster customer answers, less manual mileage logging for IFTA and reimbursement.
A few claims circulate widely that we won't repeat:
The savings are real and they are mostly not where the brochures point. Fuel is the one everyone buys for and it delivers a measurable but modest and decaying single-digit percentage. Labour verification and claims exposure are less advertised and, for most service and construction fleets in our region, larger.
It depends on your fleet type. For service and construction fleets that bill hourly, verified arrival and departure times usually beat fuel. For long-haul and heavy-idle operations, fuel leads. For anyone operating in Georgia, reduced litigation exposure may be the largest number of all, given that Georgia is one of six states producing about 61% of US nuclear verdicts.
Some do, and the real numbers are smaller than the marketing. GEICO announced up to 10% for new commercial policyholders who share Motive dash cam and ELD data, in select states. Sentry publishes up to 3% for sharing ELD data and up to 5% for ELD plus dashcam. Both require consent to share data, not merely having hardware installed. Claims of 30% savings have no filed rate or study behind them that we could find.
We won't quote you a number, because no credible independent source publishes one. Work it out from your own figures: take your measured idle hours, multiply by the Argonne burn rate for your vehicle class, multiply by current diesel. That calculation is defensible. "ROI in 60 days" is not.
It improves recovery odds more than it prevents theft. With cargo theft losses up roughly 60% to an estimated $725 million in 2025 and average loss per incident at $273,990, the recovery case is straightforward — particularly for trailers and unpowered equipment, which are the hardest assets to locate once moved.
We install GPS, cameras and telematics for fleets of every size across Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, and we come to your yard. If you're weighing this up and want a straight answer about what it will and won't do for your specific operation, call us and describe your fleet — we'd rather tell you honestly than sell you a rollout you don't need.
Get a free quote from API Signal → or call/text 803-513-1009. We install across Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, and we come to your yard.
We install GPS, cameras and telematics across GA, SC & NC — at your yard, on your schedule.