Ford made the switch to an aluminum body for 2015 for a variety of reasons. One of those was to hopefully improve the fuel economy of their full-size pickup truck. They even introduced a smaller, 2.7L EcoBoost V6 to help get a better number. Whenever we talk about fuel economy here, we often here “who buys a truck for fuel economy?” Lots of people do, and they’re called fleet managers.
A couple of miles-per-gallon might not make a huge difference over a year’s worth of driving. Let’s say you drive 20,000 miles per year. At 20 MPG, you used 1,000 gallons of gasoline that year. If you were in a truck with 22 MPG, you would have used 909.1 gallons of fuel. At $2.50/gallon, that’s an additional $249.98 a year in gasoline.
Who cares, right?
What if you were responsible for purchasing 100 trucks? Buy buying the truck that gets 22 miles per gallon, you’d have saved your company $24,998/year in fuel. For businesses trying to reduce costs everywhere they can, that’s a huge amount of money. It’s also an additional part-time employee.
Obviously, the more vehicles they have, the more they’ll save by looking at a truck with a few more miles-per-gallon.
We recently spoke with Nick Saporito, who helped his telco company purchase a fleet of new support vehicles, and eventually purchased Transit Connects, in part by the fuel economy they offered.
Fuel economy might not play a big role in the individual purchase of a truck, but for those managing potentially hundreds of trucks, it’s at the forefront of their mind.
Source: Ford-Trucks
