I was recently driving to Big Bend National Park from Dallas. It is pretty much due West for about 9 hours. I noticed that on the way out there I was able to get about 14 MPG and on the way back i was able to get 16.5 MPG. I knew that we were going from about 300 ft in Dallas to about 5000 ft above sea level in Big Bend but i didn’t realize that I would see such a dramatic difference in MPG.
Soooo.. This is how things get developed. What if we could access elevation information and show the best route for a truck to take and then integrate this technology into the Free Load Board. Since fuel is the number one driver in cost of freight and if you can save some then you can earn more money on the load we have what I think is a peanut butter and chocolate moment. We are in development and it may only be a few weeks away. We will be able to show the routing for each route based on elevation. The user can use this info to negotiate and choose the best route to take.
Our idea is to show 3 different routes when available and the elevation of each. One example is between Boston and Dallas there are 3 distinctly different ways to go and all are within just a few miles of each other in routing. Go through Ohio, Go through Wash DC or go through PA. If you could save some milage by taking less hills it would be worth doing on that route. We look at elevation all over the route so it is not just start and finish. In this example we would look at the elevation to Upstate NY vs Shenandoah Valley vs 95 North.
All very interesting and we will be very excited if we can get this program off the ground. This is one of those tools like our freight forecasting tool and our state by state milage that is able to help truck profitability and help make the web a little more useful to the trucker.