Your fuel line just picked up an extra $1,700 a month — and diesel had nothing to do with it. Gasoline, the fuel actually running your ProMasters and Transits, just clawed back five weeks of relief in a single climb.
EIA weekly data puts the national average at $4.141/gal for the week of August 10, down slightly from $4.211 the week prior — a rare bit of good news. But zoom out and the trend flips: that same $4.141 is up 5.9% from the $3.911/gal reading on July 6, a climb that's outpaced typical seasonal drift.
For a fleet running Ram ProMaster 2500s (18 mpg) or Ford Transit 350s (19 mpg), the math adds up fast. A van covering 120 miles a day at 18 mpg burns roughly 6.7 gallons daily. At the July 6 price, that's $26 a day in fuel. At the August 10 price, it's $28 — a $2 swing per van, per day, purely from five weeks of gasoline movement.
Run that across a 40-van DSP and the five-week climb adds roughly $80 a day, or close to $1,700 a month, with no change in route density, driver hours, or delivery volume. That's margin evaporating before a single Amazon rate negotiation even starts.
The week-over-week dip from $4.211 to $4.141 is worth watching — it could mean the summer run-up is topping out, or it could be a one-week pause before the next leg up. Either way, gasoline is now the more volatile fuel line for most DSP fleets, and it's the one that rarely gets modeled with the same rigor as diesel.
See how this affects your cost per stop — free calculator at pexara.ai/calculator