Asparuh Koev, CEO of Transmetrics, advises flexibility and choosing the right tools as key to surviving soaring fuel prices.

Asparuh Koev, CEO of Transmetrics

As daily news reports indicate that the conflict in the Middle East has had a profound effect on fuel prices, fleets now face a precarious period of operational uncertainty. In this environment, high petrol costs are a strategic challenge that can easily wreck a fleet’s planning horizon.

There’s no overstating just how brutal fuel hikes will be to commercial fleets. While heavy-duty vehicles will be hit harder, lightweight vehicles will also feel the pinch as prices can spike on short notice and every jump can hit your cash flow immediately.

These fuel hikes affect your planning horizon as your cost per mile now becomes a moving target and it becomes much harder to know which routes are still profitable and which ones are now loss-making, even if things looked fine a month ago.

A company’s planning horizon can include ensuring they have sufficient fleet capacity, establishing long-term contracts or other subcontracting needs. Companies will now think twice before committing fixed capacity to long contracts, because one wrong assumption on fuel can lock you into a bad economic forecast for months. In addition to this, some operators start parking trucks and vans, delay maintenance or cut back on subcontractors simply because they do not know whether they can cover the fuel bill in three months. All of these can make capacity forecasts more cautious and less stable as a result.

Looking ahead, if fuel costs stay uncertain, fleets shouldn’t hedge all their bets on any one scenario. Instead, in a world where the market reacts to various changes, it is anticipated that if fuel prices stay uncertain rather than just high, smaller fleets should expect more margin pressure and shorter planning horizons from their customers.

In this context, it’s wise to plan around three essential pillars that apply equally to heavy duty and LCV fleets. First, make sure every contract has a clear, transparent fuel surcharge that you can adjust often enough. If not, get that into your next negotiation or be ready to walk away. It’s also wise to plan for prolonged pressure on margins. Costs can rise faster than most fleets are willing to accept, so businesses need clear mechanisms in their contracts for fuel surcharges and tariff‑related adjustments.

Second, protect your cash flow by running scenarios and maintaining a clear view of how long you can survive if fuel prices jump again. It also makes sense to talk early to your bank if you need more working capital.

Lastly, be ruthless about efficiency. This can include reducing empty miles, tightening routing, watching idling and driving behaviour, and avoiding taking ‘hero loads’ that look good for volume but kill your margin under today’s fuel prices.

In a world of rising petrol or diesel costs, the winners will be the fleets that build flexibility into their model. That means structuring contracts so a portion of your capacity is variable rather than fixed, diversifying your customer base and route mix so you are not exposed to one route, and being ready to redeploy trucks as customers rewire their networks. In other words, if you have a more contract-based business model, diversify it with dynamic pricing and invest in tools that can give you an edge on the spot market.

Uncertainty in pricing is actually an area where AI can be very useful, as long as you use it as a decision support tool rather than as a black box. As diesel prices continue to rise, for example, AI tools can support more dynamic pricing by suggesting what you should quote on a route today–given fuel, tolls, and your current capacity–so your sales team does not rely on outdated rate sheets.

AI tools can also help simulate counterfactual scenarios that accurately predict margins like profitability or logistics bottlenecks in your business. Those are the kinds of simulations that are incredibly helpful for deciding which contracts you should renegotiate and which ones you should walk away from.

Although AI tools are very practical assistants, in this kind of volatility they don’t function as some kind of magic button. The algorithms are only as good as the data, and they don’t understand relationships or long‑term strategy by themselves. They might recommend a price that is mathematically optimal but tone‑deaf for a strategic customer you absolutely want to keep. The key is that AI does the heavy calculation work, but you still make the final commercial decisions based on your relationships and risk appetite.