Gas Just Dropped Below $4 — Don't Waste the Relief

Tyreese: Good morning. Welcome in. Happy Veterans Day. If you served, thank you, truly. And if you have got a veteran in your driveway today, take care of them.

Here is the thing I woke up to. Yesterday, Tuesday, gas dropped under four dollars a gallon nationwide. Three dollars and ninety-eight cents, according to A A A. First time under four bucks since July. A week ago it was four dollars and fifteen cents. A month ago, four dollars and thirty-seven cents. Now, before anybody pops champagne, it is still about a dollar higher than it was a year ago, and diesel is still sitting over six dollars, six dollars and fifteen cents and change. So the pump is giving a little back, but it is not giving it all back.

And here is the other side of that coin, from a piece Automotive Fleet ran November first. Fleet operating costs are still more than twenty percent above where they were in twenty twenty. Maintenance prices are up about eight percent this year alone. The average repair ticket is five hundred and seventy-five dollars now. It was five hundred and twenty-three dollars two years ago. And the fleets holding onto old trucks? A truck in its first year costs about two thousand dollars a year to maintain. A truck ten years or older costs more than forty-five hundred. Fleetio's numbers say trucks ten years and older drive twelve percent of the miles and eat thirty-four percent of the service spending.

So here is the tactic. When gas is high, your customers stretch. They push the oil change out, they wait, they hope. When gas drops, two things happen. They start driving more again, and they feel like they just got a raise. That feeling is your window. The pump just handed them back about forty cents a gallon. Take ten cents of it. Do not discount your price. Redirect their relief. The line is simple. Gas is down, miles are going back up, and the cheapest mile is a maintained mile. For your fleet customers especially, the ones running ten-year-old trucks because new ones cost too much, those trucks are where the money is bleeding. A scheduled service from you is the cheapest line on their whole maintenance bill, and it is the one that keeps the truck out of the five-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar repair shop.

So here is your action, and it is small. Before your first job today, pick one customer. One fleet, one repeat, one truck you know is overdue, and send them one text. Gas just dropped under four bucks. Miles are going back up. Let us get your service on the calendar this week, before the winter miles pile on. One text. One truck. That is it.

The full show drops right after this one, and we are going deeper on the fleet math today. Go take care of your people. I will see you out there.