Diesel averaged $6.13 a gallon on November 10, up $2.51 from a year ago, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). And this isn't just about crude oil. Diesel has outrun crude because refining capacity is tight in the U.S. and overseas, with almost no slack left to absorb the shortfall.

That matters for how fleets plan. A crude spike can unwind in a quarter. A refining squeeze takes longer to fix. Carriers waiting for relief at the pump may be waiting a while.

Fuel surcharges help, but they lag the pump. They don't recover everything, and they rarely cover the miles a truck runs empty. At $3.67 diesel, that gap was manageable. At $6, it's a margin problem.

The empty mile just got more expensive

ATRI's most recent data puts industry deadhead at 16.5%. That means roughly one in every six miles a truck drives earns nothing. On 100,000 miles a year, that's about 16,500 empty miles per truck.

At 6.5 miles per gallon and today's diesel price, those empty miles burn about $15,700 in fuel per truck per year. A year ago, the same miles cost about $9,300. Nothing about the operation changed, but the bill went up by roughly $6,400 per truck.

For a 100-truck fleet, that adds up to about $1.6 million a year in fuel spent hauling nothing. About $640,000 of it is new this year.

Every 10 cents on a gallon of diesel costs a 100-truck fleet about $154,000 a year. You can't negotiate that price. You can decide how many miles you burn it on.

Deadhead is decided before the truck moves

We tend to talk about deadhead as something that happens on the road. Most of it is locked in hours or days earlier. It happens when a load is accepted without a clear view of where that truck goes next. It happens when drivers are assigned one at a time instead of across the fleet. And it happens when the backhaul search starts at delivery instead of at dispatch.

Each of those decisions makes sense on its own. The cost only shows up when you look at the whole fleet.

The best dispatchers I know are excellent at this for the trucks in front of them. The limit is scale. No one can keep 100 trucks in their head at once, along with every driver's hours, every home-time commitment, and the next several days of freight across every lane. That isn't a skills gap. It's simply more than one person can track.

Where AI earns its keep

This is where AI is useful in trucking right now. It isn't a buzzword, and it doesn't replace the people running the freight. It does practical math at fleet scale.

A well-built system looks at the whole fleet and all the available freight together. It recommends chains of loads that reduce empty miles while honoring hours of service and driver home time. It flags the load that looks good on rate but leaves a truck 200 miles from its next pickup. The dispatcher still reviews the recommendation and makes the call. The difference is that they're working from a fleet-wide plan instead of a single load.

If you're evaluating these tools, hold them to one standard: The system must explain why it made each recommendation, and your team must be able to tune it to how you run your business. If your dispatchers can't see the reasoning, they won't trust the recommendation, and they shouldn't.

Measure the right thing

Rate per loaded mile makes a fleet look healthier than it is because it leaves out the miles that cost money and earn nothing. Margin per total mile, including deadhead, tells you the truth.

That measure also protects you from the wrong fix. Cutting deadhead by grabbing the nearest cheap backhaul isn't a win. Sometimes 80 empty miles to a strong load beats 10 empty miles to a weak one. The goal isn't the fewest empty miles; it's the most margin from every mile you pay for.

What to do this quarter:

• Know your real deadhead number. Break it out by driver, lane, and terminal, not as a single fleet average. The problems are concentrated.
• Reprice the empty mile. Run the math at today's diesel price. Most fleets are still working from last year's number.
• Start the backhaul search when the outbound load is booked, not when it delivers.
• Plan further out than today. Deadhead decisions improve when dispatch can see several days ahead.
• Set a standard for your technology. Ask for recommendations your team can see, question, and override.

The refining squeeze will ease eventually, but probably not soon. Fleets that tighten their operations now won't give that margin back when prices come down. High fuel prices don't create inefficiency. They show you how much was already there.