Regular gasoline hit $4.141 a gallon this week, per EIA weekly data as of August 10. That's not a diesel headline — it's the number that actually hits your P&L.
Most last-mile fleets run gas, not diesel. The Ram ProMaster 2500 and Ford Transit 350 — the two vehicles dominating DSP rosters — average 18 and 19 mpg respectively, and neither gets a break at the pump the way long-haul diesel operators sometimes do when carriers lock in bulk contracts. A route van logging 120 miles a day at 18 mpg burns roughly 6.7 gallons daily. At $4.141, that's $27.74 in fuel per van, per day — before idle time, AC load in August heat, or stop-and-go traffic in dense delivery zones, all of which drag real-world mpg below the EPA sticker number.
Scale that across a 40-van DSP and you're looking at over $1,100 a day in fuel spend, more than $33,000 a month, moving with every EIA print. Operators who built their cost-per-stop models on spring pricing are already behind — gasoline has been grinding higher through summer, and the seasonal pattern doesn't typically favor relief until well into fall.
The operators managing this well aren't hoping for lower prices. They're rebuilding their route density assumptions so fewer miles carry the same stop count, auditing idle time on hot days, and pricing fuel volatility into their Amazon rate conversations instead of absorbing it silently. The ones getting squeezed are the ones still running last quarter's fuel assumption into this quarter's bids.
Fuel is the line item that moves the fastest and gets modeled the least. See how this affects your cost per stop — free calculator at pexara.ai/calculator