Fleet operators may have little influence over the price of diesel, but they still have control over how efficiently they spend on fuel. After absorbing higher fuel costs throughout much of 2026, Samsara is focusing on that controllable portion of the expense with its new Fuel Command Center.
Launched on Aug. 19, the platform brings a fleet’s total fuel spending and potentially recoverable fuel costs into a single dashboard. It breaks down those savings opportunities by root cause and recommends the action that could have the greatest impact in each area. Samsara estimates that its U.S. customers collectively had about $2 billion in potential fuel-spend savings during the first six months of 2026.
“Fuel is one of the biggest costs a fleet carries—30% to 40% of total marginal operating costs,” said Ryan Yu, vice president of product at Samsara, in the company’s announcement.
Yu told FreightWaves that one of the challenges fleets face is that fuel-related information is often spread across different parts of their operations and technology stack.
“The insight that we have from customers is that a lot of these things are fragmented,” Yu said. “This extends to various parts of the product and to customers who don’t have a holistic view on what their actual opportunity is with respect to saving money on fuel.”
That makes identifying the amount of recoverable fuel spending the platform’s first task.
“So they can actually see with their own eyes here is the percentage of my spend that I can claw back and save,” Yu said.
The dashboard separates those potential savings into several categories, including idling, driver behavior, fraud, suspicious fuel drops and fueling at the wrong locations. It then links each issue to a recommended action, such as activating in-cab idling alerts, adding a preferred fuel vendor or monitoring performance trends from one quarter to the next.
Fuel routing built into the route
Samsara’s Commercial Navigation adds fuel planning directly into route construction by incorporating preferred fueling locations before a driver even leaves the yard.
The system calculates routes using a fleet’s negotiated corporate fuel rates. When a truck needs fuel during a trip, it can reroute the driver to the nearest preferred station.
In a 90-day analysis involving more than 2,000 Samsara customers, companies that fueled through preferred vendors reduced their fuel spending by a median of 4%.
The platform can pull fuel transactions from a fleet’s existing fuel card. It also integrates Coast’s spending controls directly, while connecting with WEX and Comdata. Fleets can additionally import discounts they have negotiated with individual truck stop chains.
“Irrespective of whether using Coast, WEX or Comdata, we can get a kind of collective understanding about what they’re spending,” Yu said. “We have knowledge on where the best places are to fuel and the cheapest places are to fuel.”
Yu described a hypothetical trip involving a driver leaving Chicago for Austin, Texas, with the fleet’s negotiated truck-stop discounts already loaded into the system.
“If I as a driver go into commercial navigation, I start in Chicago and I type in Austin, Texas as a destination, what commercial navigation will do is it will take a look at all the real-time fuel prices, the discounts that my fleet has, and formulate the exact route and stops that I should take while taking into account where I should fuel to save the most money” he said.
The calculation also takes the truck’s fuel capacity and consumption into account, because Samsara already has information about the vehicle.
“We know how many gallons the tank holds because we know what the make, model, and year is,” Yu said. “We know it’s at 80% when you start in Chicago, and we know how far that gets you to Texas. From there, we can calculate the exact spots you need to fuel based on how quickly your fuel will deplete, and the discounts your fleet has with specific truck stops.”
That fuel-routing capability remains in beta, with Samsara currently rolling it out to customers, according to Yu.
Card authorization tied to vehicle location
Fuel card fraud becomes an even more significant concern as diesel prices rise. Samsara’s analysis found that detected fraud incidents increase by roughly 9% for every 10-cent increase in the price of diesel.
To address that risk, Samsara links fuel-card authorization to the vehicle’s location and can block a transaction when the assigned truck is not physically present at the fueling point.
“We used to worry about fraud all the time. Cards went missing, PINs were shared, and we had no way to verify transactions,” said Tim Weisser, fleet operations manager at Milestone Home Services, in Samsara’s announcement. “Now with Coast and Samsara, the system takes care of it. If the truck’s not there, the card doesn’t work. Simple.”
The company also cited savings after implementing the system.
“After implementing Coast through Samsara, we saw our fuel expenses drop by nearly $15,000 a month,” said Kyle Stewart, chief financial officer at Trades Holding, in the same announcement.
The authorization check takes place directly at the pump, before the charge is cleared.
Route adherence is the next build
For fleets without a dedicated fuel department, visibility represents the starting point. The next step is compliance, and Samsara is now building that capability into the system.
Yu said the upcoming reporting will show how each driver performed against the route they were assigned, while also explaining why a driver deviated from it.
“With commercial navigation, we have full native visibility into what drivers are actually seeing on the ground, because they’re always in turn-by-turn navigation when they’re driving. So we can actually display to the fleet admin, hey, they didn’t stop here because maybe there was traffic or some other condition like weather,” Yu said.
The same visibility could also be used to recognize drivers who consistently follow their routes.
“We’re also able to do things downstream like recognizing a driver who’s adhered to their route and is doing really well. Here’s how we can recognize them, here’s how we can reward them,” Yu said.
