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Calculating Fuel Tax with GPS?

truck fuel tax with gpsI just read an interesting article about how trucking fleets are using GPS to calculate their fuel taxes. Since fuel taxes are generally handled by the states and since truckers typically operate across state lines they often need to calculate their usage in various locales. GPS position reporting is a good way to do this as not only would it report your GPS location but it would also report the time for each position report. Ideally, you could automate this process with reporting transmitted as you go.

It is likely that state and local governments will increase their use of GPS to support pay-as-you-go taxation paradigms.

While it seems like a difficult task to calculate your fuel taxes, GPS tracking of your fleet can only make it easier. Consider this description:

This can be an onerous administrative task.  If you have a fleet of over 50 trucks, there is a good chance you have one person, perhaps making $40,000 annually, focused solely on this paper-intensive task.  But the process can be automated if a company uses GPS/telematics devices in its trucks, along with fuel cards and IFTA tax reporting software (or a tax service provider that uses this kind of software).  Then the mileage driven in each state and fuel expenditures for a particular vehicle can be automatically loaded into the software and the proper IFTA reports can be printed.  The process becomes much less paper intensive.  While a fleet operator would probably never buy a telematics solution solely to eliminate a clerical position, it can contribute to the ROI offered by telematics solutions.

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Tracking Stolen Trucks with GPS

tracking tow trucks with gps
GPS tracking solutions like RavTrack are useful for more than the usual vehicle tracking. You can also use RavTrack to track stolen assets and recover stolen property with GPS. In Fort Launderdale, a tow truck company owner tracked down two of his trucks that had been stolen:

What the culprits didn’t know was that the Ford F-450s were equipped with high-end GPS tracking systems that would chart their every move over the next 36 hours.

Fort Lauderdale police arrested two men for the theft of the wreckers, which had wireless GPS tracking hardware installed on them. Police used GPS position reporting to capture the suspects.

Jason Parrett, owner of the Fort Lauderdale repossession truck company First Response Towing and Recovery, said the Global Positioning System units were crucial to finding the missing wreckers.

“Without it we wouldn’t have found the trucks,” said Parrett, who has equipped all three trucks in his fleet with GPS technology.

Parrett said an employee called him early Saturday to tell him the two trucks were missing.

Once Parrett figured out which two trucks were gone, he asked his wife to pull up their locations on her BlackBerry, which is linked to their GPS units.

When the police arrived, the owner provided the GPS system’s activity report, which showed where the trucks had been, places where they had been parked for extended periods and how fast they had been driven. The police later arrested the two men at one of the locations listed on the GPS report.

“The detailed activity reports in these are disgustingly accurate,” Parrett said of the system.

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Using GPS Fleet Systems in the Developing World

One of the issues with the accelerated economic growth of the developing world is the reliability of road and mapping data. In many places like Dubai and China construction is taking place at such a rapid pace that municipal authorities cannot assign addresses fast enough to meet demand. Likewise, in other places like India, existing mapping data is simply unreliable. This is where GPS can be ideal as GPS uses your specific position and geographic coordinates, which makes it immune to problems that plague traditional mapping systems that use street names and other arbitrary assignments of position.
In places like Nagpur, India, city officials are meeting such challenges by installing fleet management systems in their ambulances and emergency vehicles in order to best respond to emergencies and disasters:

Dr Pradhan said that whenever anybody calls 102, the control room can track the ambulance nearest to the spot and direct it to the place. “OCHRI has installed the device on all its six ambulances as well as those of other private hospitals,” he said.
Dr Noorul Amin, senior medical officer and in-charge of Emergency Medical Services at OCHRI, said that GPS technology uses radio waves to calculate the distance between vehi Dr Pradhan said these ambulances would have one hospital staff capable of providing first aid at the spot itself. He also underlined the need for providing all life-saving medicines in them. He said the project was brainchild of NMC commissioner Aseem Gupta.

Fleet management using GPS is an ideal way to quickly respond and deploy your assets to react to crisis quickly. This is a trend we expect to continue.