Optimal Dynamics says cutting empty truck miles can shrink driver pay

Optimal Dynamics customers have seen deadhead miles drop by 4% to 8% with the company's optimization software, across over-the-road, regional and local operations. Ben Marks, vice president of sales engineering and customer success, gave the figures in a Nov. 4 webinar covered by Leo Barros for Truck News. The session looked at ways fleets can guard their margins by tying together transportation management, optimization and telematics systems.

Marks opened with a line he credited to a Challenger representative: the most environmentally friendly mile is the one a fleet never drives. He then added a point of his own. That same unrun mile, he said, also happens to be the least expensive one.

He also added a catch. A carrier that trims company empty miles by 5% and doesn't replace them with paid work can end up cutting its drivers' wages, he said. An empty mile is the cheapest one to skip. It may still be a mile someone was counting on.

That turns a routing problem into a utilization problem. Barros framed cutting empty miles as only half the equation; carriers also have to add revenue-generating miles, improve driver productivity and control operating costs without hurting service. So a fleet operations leader looking at an optimizer has two things to work out. First, do the hours freed from empty running actually get filled with freight? Second, can the TMS, the optimizer and the telematics share data fast enough to make that happen?

Where the freed hours go

Optimal Dynamics builds its recommendations from forecasting, advanced mathematics and AI. The software weighs the freight network, which drivers are available, facility operating hours and the loads expected to appear. Here's the kind of call it makes: instead of sending a truck 200 miles to grab a load that's available now, it might stage the truck 100 miles away for freight it expects to open up.

Marks shared a few customer results. One customer cut load relays by almost 40%. Several saw deadhead fall 5% to 6% in the most recent quarter. These are outcomes the vendor reported, and the webinar didn't spell out the baseline or the lanes behind the 4% to 8% range. So they work best as a sense of scale, not a guarantee.

The figure that ties this together is a different one. Marks said better planning and faster decisions can add a quarter to half a load movement per truck each week. That's where the gain shows up as revenue instead of just avoided cost. It's also what protects the driver's side of the equation.

A 5% cut in empty miles is a cost win for the carrier and, for a driver whose pay tracks miles, possibly a smaller check, which makes loads per truck per week the number that settles whether the cut paid off.

Freed hours can also leak away before they ever reach a load. An ELD Mandate cost guide describes detention, when drivers are held beyond the agreed loading or unloading time, as a stretch where the truck stays occupied and the driver loses productive hours. An optimizer can stage a truck perfectly and still lose the gain at a dock, which suggests detention belongs on the same scorecard as deadhead when a fleet judges whether the extra load materialized.

Fuel tops the worry list, drivers top the bill

Fleets in the webinar's audience poll named fuel as their biggest cost pressure. Repair and maintenance came second, then driver turnover, then insurance. Jean-Sebastien Bouchard, Isaac's chief product officer and co-founder, moderated the session.

National cost data from the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), as cited in the ELD Mandate guide, ranks those lines a little differently. The poll covered only the fleets that attended. ATRI's figures are averages across the industry for 2025.

Put side by side, driver pay costs more than twice as much per mile as fuel. That comparison is our own arithmetic on ATRI's figures. In ATRI's 2025 data, operating costs excluding fuel rose even faster than the total, by 4.2%, reaching $1.854 per mile, and both measures outpaced consumer inflation. A tool that saves on fuel but cuts into driver earnings may just push cost onto the line that's hardest to fill: the driver seat, where turnover already ranked third in the poll.

The guide spells out what an empty seat costs: recruitment, background checks, onboarding, training and temporary staffing, plus indirect costs from vacant positions, delayed deliveries and reduced fleet utilization. That last item is the twist. If a deadhead cut trims pay enough to push drivers out, the vacancy could erode the very utilization the optimizer was bought to raise.

Fuel cost per mile stayed roughly flat in 2025, so the savings come from using less fuel rather than paying less for it, and driving fewer miles is the most direct way to use less. Cutting miles that don't need to be driven also means less wear on trucks, lower maintenance bills and less exposure to risks on the road. Repair and maintenance costs rose 8.6% per mile in 2025, so the maintenance savings could matter as much as the fuel.

One record, three systems

Dacia Gulledge, McLeod Software's director of integration, product, said the company's LoadMaster TMS acts as the central source of operating data. Load details, driver hours, truck locations and dispatch recommendations flow between LoadMaster, optimization providers and Isaac's telematics platform. Dispatchers don't have to retype the same information in each one. After a trip ends, its data goes back to LoadMaster for billing, driver pay and performance reporting.

Fuel planning runs on the same data. Gulledge said the fuel optimization weighs negotiated discounts, pump prices, preferred suppliers, driver amenities and how far a truck has to go to reach the station. Afterward, fuel card transactions can be checked against the planned purchases to see whether drivers followed the recommendation.

Isaac handles the in-cab side of that loop. Matt Ruth, the company's chief partnership and integration officer, said the selected fuel stop can go directly into the driver's trip plan. According to Ruth, the system then sends the driver to that stop as part of the trip automatically, with no extra thought needed on the driver's part. Isaac's predictive workflow also guides drivers through pickups, deliveries, navigation, document scanning and electronic logging from a single place, so they don't have to switch between apps.

That automatic routing matters for the fuel-card check Gulledge described. If the stop is already in the trip, a mismatch between planned and actual purchases is more likely to flag a real exception than a driver who never saw the recommendation.

Truck-specific navigation helps with the miles an optimizer can't see. Ruth said it prevents detours and delays from wrong entrances, roads a truck shouldn't be on, and routes that ignore vehicle size or hazmat restrictions. Isaac Fuel Coach looks at how each driver actually drives. Ruth said simple miles-per-gallon rankings between drivers can be thrown off by differences in the trucks themselves.

The ELD Mandate guide lists the habits that sit underneath those rankings: excessive idling, aggressive driving and unnecessary acceleration all raise fuel consumption without generating revenue. Scoring behavior instead of raw MPG puts those habits, rather than the spec sheet, at the center of the coaching conversation.

Upgrade the connections or replace the TMS

The webinar setup kept the existing TMS at the center and connected the newer tools to it. Bill Cain, director of product management for TMW.Suite at Trimble Transportation, made the same case to Heavy Duty Trucking editor Deborah Lockridge on Nov. 5. Cain said replacing a TMS isn't always the best answer. Newer technology can work with established platforms, he said, and moving to the cloud doesn't have to mean abandoning the system a fleet already runs. He also pointed to dispatch, order entry and billing as areas where AI and automation are starting to take on work.

The conversation framed the choice as three paths: an upgrade, new integrations or a complete replacement. HDT's bottom line was to start with what the technology needs to accomplish and whether the current system can get there. For the deadhead question, that test is concrete: can the existing TMS hand an optimizer load, hours and location data, and take completed trips back for driver pay?

Writing in FleetOwner, Jane Clark described the larger shift as moving from systems of record, which document what already happened, to systems of intelligence that help predict what comes next. Clark sees two roles for AI: agents that handle tasks people used to do by hand, and models that spot patterns and forecast outcomes. The optimizer staging a truck for freight that hasn't posted yet is the prediction role in action.

Clark's clearest example of prediction is maintenance, where AI reads diagnostics, maintenance history and mileage to flag emerging problems, with fewer unexpected breakdowns and less downtime as the potential payoff. That connects back to the utilization math. The ELD Mandate guide notes a broken-down truck can cost a carrier delivery opportunities, and a truck sitting in the shop can't haul the extra quarter load either.

This matters most for fleets whose TMS can send load, hours and location data to an outside optimizer and take completed trips back. A fleet with no data feed in either direction has a harder choice to make. For everyone else, the deadhead percentage is the number vendors will lead with. The extra quarter to half load per truck each week is the one that shows whether the cut paid off for the carrier and its drivers.