According to the latest figures from the AA, fuel prices continue to rise at the nation’s fuel pumps, but the cheapest fuel continues to be found at supermarket forecourts.

AA figures shows that diesel now costs on average 137.5ppl or £6.25 per gallon from a supermarket forecourt compared to a national average of 139.6ppl or £6.34 per gallon, a saving of 2.1ppl or 9.5p per gallon.

That means that a company car driver travelling 30,000 miles a year in a Ford Mondeo 2.0 Duratorq TDCi, with an average fuel consumption of 53.3mpg, would see a fuel cost saving of £160.41 over three years by filling up at supermarkets rather than branded outlets.  

On a fleet of 200 similar cars over a typical three year replacement cycle that adds up to an impressive fuel cost saving of £32,082, simply by steering clear of garage forecourts in favour of supermarkets.

Commenting on the potential savings that fleets could make, John Tandy (Inset), business development manager at Mycompanyfleet, said: 'Fleet managers can make considerable savings in running costs by insisting that their drivers use fuel from supermarket forecourts in all but exceptional circumstances, as the latest fuel price figures from the AA show.'

Based on the feedback of Mycompanyfleet customers, Tandy also emphasised the potential benefits in choosing to implement a dashboard management facility, in an effort to further reduce fuel costs. 

He commented: 'FleetAcumen allows the fleet manager to configure the look and feel of the dashboard to suit his or her own business requirements, and it’s all encapsulated into our fleet software bundle so there’s no shock having to purchase an additional business intelligence tool to analyse it as there is with other systems,” said Jon Tandy.

'A powerful dashboard offering like ours will allow the user to make more informed decisions using benchmarking techniques, and real life fleet experience shows that this can easily return savings fuel cost savings of 5% or more.

'Fleet Acumen also operates on an enterprise-wide basis so that, rather than having separate systems for logistics , fleet management and fuel management,  you get the complete fleet management toolset, including an an advanced dashboard offering, to manage everyday back office tasks, like fines, maintenance, duty of care, grey fleet and all vehicle details,' he added.