Every truck rolling down I-65 today is a rolling data factory. Speed, braking, idle time, engine health, it’s all getting captured. The trouble, according to brand new research from the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), is that fleets aren’t always looking at the numbers that matter most.

The Metric Fleets Undervalue Most

ATRI just released From Telematics Data to Decisions: High-Value Performance Metrics for Trucking Operations, and the headline finding ought to make every fleet manager check their dashboard twice. Cost-per-mile scored the highest importance rating of any metric in the operations category. Only 73 percent of carriers surveyed actually use it.

That’s not a small gap. That’s nearly a third of the industry sitting on one of the most useful numbers their trucks already generate and doing nothing with it.

“This research identifies the performance metrics that fleets find most valuable, and highlights those that, for some carriers, deserve more consideration,” said Robert Braswell, executive director of the American Trucking Associations’ Technology & Maintenance Council.

Translation: know what your telematics system can tell you, then actually look at it.

Where Fleets Already Excel

Give credit where it’s due. For safety, the industry is doing its homework. Critical events, speeding, risky driving behavior and hard braking topped the list of most widely adopted safety metrics, exactly the numbers that keep drivers and everyone else on the road safer. That’s not an accident.

It’s years of the industry treating driver safety like the non-negotiable it is.

The Maintenance Gap Nobody’s Closing

Where things fall apart a bit is maintenance. Nearly half the 111 fleets surveyed, 48 percent, don’t integrate their telematics with maintenance management software at all. Preventive maintenance, fault diagnosis and engine health monitoring all rank high in value to carriers, yet adoption trails well behind what fleets already do for safety.

For an Alabama shop wrenching on a truck that’s already three weeks behind schedule, that gap is real money. A fault code caught early is a Tuesday afternoon repair. The same fault ignored is a breakdown on I-59 during a Friday rush.

The findings give carriers a blueprint, not a mandate, but it’s one worth studying closely.