Few stories, if any, have garnered more headlines or stimulated more conversations in recent weeks than surging fuel costs. For millions of Aussies, the pain when a tank reaches $300 is visceral. For fleet operators, when costs run into the tens of thousands, it’s existential.
Whether you’re running refrigerated vans to commercial kitchens, dispatching trade supplies to construction sites, moving pathology samples with strict regulations, or managing retail’s last mile, fuel is far more than a line item at the bottom of your P&L statement.
In fact, according to research from NowGo by Shippit, 83 per cent of carriers say that fuel price volatility will be their biggest operational challenge in 2026. In response, they’re adopting a range of tactics: from temporary surcharges, to dynamic pricing, and re-negotiating contracts with major customers.
However, these are reactive responses not proactive strategies. Only one in six are optimising fleets and routes to use fuel more efficiently. Surcharges and renegotiated contracts might buy short-term breathing room, but they don’t address the underlying problem. With fuel costs surging and other margin threats in regular supply, operators that shift their focus from cost recovery to cost prevention will protect their margins long-term. That starts with the fleet itself.
The efficiency gap is costing you more than you think
Inefficient routing has long been a ‘silent’ margin killer, but in recent weeks that silence has become deafening. Five in six operators aren’t optimising fleets and routes; vehicles leaving depots with sub-optimal loads, drivers criss-crossing suburbs when smarter sequencing could halve the distance, dispatchers manually adjusting runs without visibility of real-time conditions. Right now, it’s costing them more money than ever.
Fewer kilometres driven means less fuel consumed. More orders completed per run means lower cost-per-delivery. Better utilisation means fewer vehicles needed to meet the same demand. Today, when margins are stretched to their limits, the gap between an optimised fleet and one managed manually is the difference between a healthy operation and one that’s losing money on delivery.
Every drop and every dollar counts, and today most fleets are leaving both on the table. This is precisely the problem NowGo by Shippit was built to solve. Powering over 30 million annual deliveries and used by thousands of drivers every day, NowGo is an AI-powered fleet management software designed for businesses running complex, time-sensitive delivery operations.
NowGo customers have improved fleet efficiency by 12%, fleet utilisation by 15%; translating that reduced fuel consumption, less driver downtime and fewer kilometres on the road. By optimising routes and fleets, it has saved millions of km of delivery vehicles on the road.
Built for the complexity of real-world fleets
Generic routing tools rarely account for the nuances of specialised operations. A pathology courier managing time-critical, temperature-sensitive samples has fundamentally different constraints to a trade supplier delivering heavy materials with a crane lift off in a pedestrian thoroughfare.
NowGo by Shippit is purpose-built for this complexity, processing massive volumes of routing data, priorities and constraints in real time. Vehicle types, capacities, delivery windows, priority orders: all managed through a single interface that saves time-poor dispatchers hours every week.
For businesses like Mitre 10, which manages in excess of 40,000 deliveries per month, the impact is tangible. Dynamic route planning and live tracking give customers accurate ETAs, so they know exactly when materials will arrive on site. And by matching the right deliveries to the right drivers across optimised routes, NowGo reduces both time travelled and fuel used at scale, every single day.
Don’t wait for the next crisis
Fuel prices will one day ease and revert to normal, but challenges are ever-present for fleet operators. So too, therefore, is the need for proactive optimisation. Waiting for the next price spike, extreme weather event, driver shortage, or supply chain disruption will consistently leave your business in ‘catch up’ mode; scrambling to manage costs rather than getting ahead of them.
The businesses that build lasting competitive advantages and optimise customer experiences will be those that treat optimisation as a proactive, ongoing operational priority and not a crisis response.
The current situation is a stark and important reminder that margin protection in logistics is won or lost in the last mile. The competitive pressure to deliver more, faster, cheaper – and more reliably – will only intensify, irrespective of the price of fuel. The fleets that use this moment to genuinely optimise won’t just weather the current storm, they’ll be better positioned for every one that follows.
NowGo by Shippit is an AI-powered last-mile delivery orchestration solution for businesses running complex, time-sensitive fleet operations. Learn more at shippit.com/products/nowgo
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