James Hyde

"Everyone knows fuel costs are increasing at a rapid pace," said James Hyde, the executive vice president of the family business, Gene Hyde Trucking Co.Inc. in Lakeland, which operates 230 trucks across the Southeast."I'm 50 years old and have been doing this all my life.This is the toughest year we've had in my entire career."

The biggest aggravation with rapidly rising fuel prices is that trucking companies can recover only about 70 to 80 percent of the additional costs through fuel surcharges, Coleman and Hyde said.
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A trucking company can collect a fuel charge only when hauling the customer's merchandise, Hyde said.But 12 to 15 percent of a truck's mileage is "deadhead," when it's empty traveling from the last unloading point to picking up another cargo.

The average Hyde truck runs 10,000 miles a month, he said.That means running at least 1,200 miles empty at an average of six miles per gallon, or burning 200 gallons of diesel.

At the current national average of $2.59 a gallon, that's an additional $518 per month for a single truck.

For Hyde's 130 trucks, that translates to $67,340 a month in fuel costs the company must absorb.For a company as large as Commercial Carrier, that would mean an additional cost of $518,000 a month.

Hyde and other companies are striving to reduce deadhead miles through high tech.

All the company's trucks have global positioning systems, or GPS, devices that feed their exact locations to the main office in Lakeland, Hyde said.That and computer scheduling allow Hyde to reduce the distance between the dropoff point and the next pickup.

"We've had to get more savvy in assigning by geographic location because of fuel costs," he said.
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For all truckers, the fuel crisis will get worse, even if diesel prices come down, Coleman and Hyde said.
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Hyde Trucking began switching this year with the purchase of 20 new trucks and has already seen a drop in the fleet mpg, Hyde said.The company's average for the three months through July dropped to 5.83 mpg.

Hyde knew that immediately because rising fuel costs have forced his company and other trucking companies to track costs daily.

"The days of saying, `We've got money in the bank.We're OK,' are over," he said.