The true cost of a refrigerated transport run

Most cost-per-mile and cost-per-kilometre calculators are built for dry freight. Run refrigerated work through one and the answer comes back wrong — because the fridge is a second engine the calculator doesn't know exists.

The costs every calculator counts

Fuel from the truck's real consumption figure, driver wages, tolls, and depreciation per kilometre or per mile. Get these from your own records, not industry averages — the spread between fleets is wide enough that an average is a guess.

The costs refrigerated transport adds

The reefer unit burns its own diesel, whether the truck is moving or parked at a dock waiting to unload. It has its own service schedule, separate from the truck's. And its failure mode is different in kind: a truck breakdown strands a vehicle, a reefer breakdown can write off the load it was protecting. Temperature record-keeping takes paid time too — someone checks, logs and files those readings. None of this appears in a dry-freight calculator, and together it is the difference between a run that looks profitable and one that is.

A worked example from a real run

The figures below are from our own refrigerated fleet — YowieTech is built inside a working transport business — shown in Australian dollars. The method is what transfers; put your own prices in.

A 10-drop metropolitan delivery run, returning to depot: 291.5 km (181 mi), about six hours.

Fuel — 52.5 L at $2.10/L (18 L/100 km, about 13 mpg US): $110. Driver wages: $195. Tolls: $69 — and note the toll calculator quoted car rates; a heavy vehicle pays roughly $40 more than a car on this run, which is exactly the kind of line item that silently eats a margin. Depreciation: $44. Total: about $418 — $1.43 per kilometre, $2.31 per mile.

At $50 per drop the run invoices $500, leaving about $82 — a 16% margin. Price the same run off a dry-freight cost model and you'd believe the margin was double that. This is why refrigerated operators quoting from generic numbers go broke slowly and then suddenly.

Cost it before the truck leaves

YowieTech prices the run at planning time — fuel from that vehicle's own consumption figure, wages, tolls and depreciation per kilometre or per mile — so you see cost against revenue before you commit to it, not in the accounts a month later. It also produces the per-run CO2 figure (this example: 140.6 kg) that larger customers increasingly ask their carriers for.