Fuel Finder Blog

We have a couple new features to announce, the ability to filter truck stop searches by one or more chain affiliations, as well as an experimental "fill group" feature, explained in a minute.

The chain affiliation filter allows you to place check boxes next to one or more chain names, "no chain" being one of the options. This will restrict the returned results by the Fuel Finder™ to those chains, only. It's pretty easy and straight forward.

The next feature isn't quite so easily explained - "Fill Groups".

This feature has been required on many surveys that we've received over the past weeks. We spent some time reviewing what we wanted to achieve with this feature based on your input, and think that it will satisfy the slightly different angles that the different requests came from.

When you're entering the route start and end points, you'll see a couple new fields, "Start Range", and "Full Range". The start range is the number of miles that you are able to travel starting from the origin on the fuel that's currently in your tank. The full range is the number of miles you're able to travel on a full tank.

The Fuel Finder™ engine takes this information, and adds a "Fill Group" column to the returned results. This "Fill Group" is a group of truck stops that fall between 10% tank capacity, and an empty tank. The concept is that these are the most logical stops to visit, based solely on your range of travel.

All results will have this added "Fill Group" column if you enter the "Start Range" and "Full Range" figures prior to running the search, but if you choose the "Miles from Origin" sort order, the fill groups will also be color coded to allow you to quickly and easily see your options.

An error will be displayed at the top of the results should there be too large a gap between truck stops for you to traverse. This is unlikely, unless you have a tiny tank, or have filtered the results using the aforementioned chain filters.

As with many other features that we've added lately, this one opens the door to many more cool things that we could do, such as use this data to suggest smaller purchase amounts at more expensive stops to get you to a stop where you can fill up at a cheaper cost, but these things will have to come as time and budgets allow.

Give this new feature a try, and give us your feedback please, we think it's pretty cool. The support guys have been playing like they're little diesel powered Hondas with 20 gallon tanks to see if they can make it from city to city. lol.

Greg Dodson
TruckMaster Logistics Systems
TruckMaster Your Trucking Company™