The war with Iran changed your fuel budget overnight. On Feb. 28, when the first strikes began, diesel was running around $3.75 a gallon nationwide. By late March, it had crossed five dollars for the first time since December 2022. We’re now at $5.62, up nearly 50 percent in five weeks, and analysts are not done talking about where it could go. Some have modeled $6. Some are discussing $7 if the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted into the summer. A group out of Australia put the probability of $200-per-barrel crude at 40 percent if the conflict extends. That is no longer a fringe number. That is a scenario serious people are pricing in.
The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. Iran closed it. The International Energy Agency called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The United States opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and released 172 million barrels. A ceasefire was announced this week after Trump threatened to level Iranian power plants, and Brent dropped about 15 percent on the news. It is still sitting above $90 a barrel, well above the $70 it was at before the war started. Analysts are already saying that even if the ceasefire holds, production in the region will not fully resume for months because of infrastructure damage. The diesel number at the pump hasn’t been back to where it was for a while. Plan your operation around that reality.
For a carrier running 100,000 miles a year at 7 miles per gallon, the difference between diesel at $3.75 and diesel at $5.62 is roughly $26,700 per truck per year in additional fuel cost. If you run 20 trucks, that is over half a million dollars in new annual exposure from a single geopolitical event you had no control over. The equipment, the routes and the freight rates are largely fixed in the near term. The driver is not. The driver is one of the biggest levers you have on your fuel line that most fleets are not pulling hard enough.
The CDL is not a performance evaluation
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations allow a carrier to use a valid commercial driver’s license in lieu of a road test during the driver qualification process. It is right there in 49 CFR 391.33. The CDL itself is accepted as evidence of driving proficiency. You can check that box, put the license in the file and move on.
Many carriers do exactly that. They treat a CDL as proof that a driver can operate a commercial vehicle at a professional level. They call it a road test waiver and they use it routinely because it saves time and because the regulation permits it.
The problem is that the CDL is not a performance evaluation. It is a minimum competency credential. It tells you the holder passed a knowledge test and a skills evaluation at some point in the past. It does not tell you how that person actually drives. It does not tell you whether they maintain a following distance. It does not tell you whether they pace traffic, manage momentum through traffic flow changes, brake smoothly or hammer the pedal. It does not tell you how they handle grades, how they read the road ahead or whether their situational awareness is sharp enough to avoid the hard inputs that destroy fuel economy and wear out equipment.
That was before the current state of CDL credentialing became what it is.
We have spent years documenting the failure of the CDL system in this publication and elsewhere. Entry-level driver training ran on a self-attestation honor system for years and still relies heavily on provider self-certification. Third-party CDL examiners have been caught accepting bribes. There are documented cases of examiners passing drivers in exchange for Swedish fish and Fiji water. CDL mills have graduated people with credentials and minimal actual skill. The FMCSA issued more than 550 notices of proposed removal to CDL training providers in a recent enforcement sweep, citing unqualified instructors, improper training vehicles and failure to meet federal requirements. None of that accounts for the fundamental shift in what a CDL actually tests in 2026.
Roughly 90 to 95 percent of new Class 8 trucks sold today are automatic transmissions. The CDL skills test most recently completed by licensed drivers was conducted automatically. There is no gear management component. There is no clutch feel. There is no requirement to demonstrate mechanical understanding of the drivetrain, engine speed management or anything that requires the driver to actively interact with the powertrain. You press the brake, you press a button, you press the accelerator and the truck figures out the rest. The credential most drivers now hold was earned on equipment that requires the least mechanical skill of any commercial vehicle configuration in the industry’s history.
That does not mean automatic transmission drivers cannot be skilled professionals. Many of them are. But the CDL no longer filters for fuel-efficient operation the way it once did, when passing the skills test required demonstrating actual mastery of the equipment. Accepting a CDL in lieu of a road test in this environment is accepting a minimum credential from a credentialing system that, by documented evidence, is deeply compromised. It tells you the person can legally drive. It tells you nothing about whether they can drive well.
What a road test tells you about your fuel budget
A pre-hire ride-along with a qualified evaluator does something no background check, no CDL review and no MVR pull can do. It shows you what the driver actually does behind the wheel in real operating conditions.
Following distance is where you start. A driver who tailgates in a loaded truck is a driver who brakes constantly, loses momentum constantly and then has to re-accelerate constantly. Every hard braking event followed by re-acceleration from low speed is one of the most fuel-intensive cycles a diesel engine performs. Aggressive braking and throttle inputs can cut fuel economy by 15 to 30 percent at highway speeds, depending on the load and terrain. A driver who maintains proper following distance, reads the road 15 to 20 seconds ahead and manages space around the truck is one who coasts into slowdowns instead of braking into them. Those are not the same thing from a fuel standpoint and they are not the same thing from a wear-and-tear standpoint either.
Speed and throttle management are the next things you watch. Every mile per hour driven above 60 costs roughly a tenth of a mile per gallon in fuel economy. A driver who runs 70 instead of 65 on a long haul is burning 27 percent more fuel to cover the same distance. At $5.62 a gallon, that difference on a single run is real money. At fleet scale across a full year, it is a significant budget line. The driver who understands how to use the engine’s torque range, who does not mash the throttle on startup and who feathers the pedal over grades rather than hammering through them is worth more to your fuel budget than most of the aerodynamic equipment you are spending money on.
Situational awareness and lane discipline tell you how a driver will perform in real traffic. A driver who changes lanes late is a driver who brakes late and accelerates to recover. A driver who positions correctly and anticipates traffic movement maintains a steady pace without constant speed changes. There can be a 35 percent difference in fuel economy between the most and least efficient drivers in the same truck on the same route running the same load. That number comes from the American Trucking Associations. It is not theoretical. It is measured fleet data. The difference between your best driver and your worst driver on fuel economy in the current diesel environment could represent thousands of dollars per truck per year on fuel alone, before you count the maintenance costs that aggressive driving behavior accelerates.
None of this shows up on a CDL. None of it is captured in an MVR. A ride-along with a trained evaluator watching following distance, throttle behavior, brake management, lane discipline, speed selection, grade technique and situational awareness gives you information the qualification file cannot. The FMCSA does not require that you obtain this information. That does not mean you should not.
The manual transmission was a filter we removed
There is a dimension to this fuel conversation that nobody in the industry talks about honestly and it connects directly to where the driver shortage narrative took us.
When most trucks were manual, learning to drive one competently required a driver to develop a working relationship with the machine. You had to understand the relationship between engine RPM and road speed. You had to know your gear ratios and your rear axle specs. You had to feel when the truck was loaded and how that changed your shift points on the uphill versus the downhill. You had to develop the judgment to know when to short-shift to manage fuel burn versus when to stay in the power band for the grade. You had to listen to the engine and read the road simultaneously, coordinating your inputs accordingly. A driver who could do all of that smoothly, over long haul, in traffic and in mountains and in weather, was a professional in the original sense of the word.
That requirement is effectively gone from the majority of commercial driving jobs. The automatic transmission manages most of those decisions. The driver’s interaction with the powertrain has been reduced to two pedals. The credential reflects that reduction because the skills test no longer requires you to demonstrate anything beyond what you already do.
The industry accepted this tradeoff because it wanted to expand the driver pool, lower training completion times, reduce turnover costs and fill seats faster. Those were real business objectives and the automatic transmission delivered on them. What it did not deliver was the mechanical literacy that manual operation produced as a byproduct. Mechanical literacy is directly connected to fuel-efficient operation because fuel-efficient driving requires the driver to understand what the machine is doing and why, not just point it down the road and let the computer figure it out.
A driver who understands torque versus horsepower, who knows the engine’s sweet spot and operates in it deliberately, who uses momentum as a tool rather than constantly fighting it, is a driver who is doing the same things a skilled manual driver had to do to keep the truck moving efficiently. Those habits can be learned automatically. They are no longer taught the way they once were, given the nature of the equipment. Which means the carrier has to evaluate them directly, at hire and on an ongoing basis, because the credentialing system no longer filters for them.
What this actually costs you right now
Take a 50-truck fleet running 110,000 miles per year per unit at current diesel prices.
A 0.5 mpg improvement in fleet average fuel economy through better driver selection and performance management saves roughly $3,000 per truck per year at $4 diesel. At $5.62 diesel, that same 0.5 mpg improvement is saving you closer to $4,200 per truck per year. Across 50 trucks, that is $210,000 annually from a half-mile-per-gallon improvement that costs you nothing but the discipline to hire and evaluate drivers on actual performance rather than credential presence.
A 1.0 mpg improvement, which is achievable when you move from your least efficient to your most efficient driver profile, is worth $420,000 across that same 50-truck fleet at current prices. That is not an aerodynamics package. That is not a new engine spec. That is hiring better people, evaluating them on actual behavior and running a performance management program that measures what matters.
Fuel is already the highest variable cost in commercial trucking. At $5.62 a gallon and rising, the cost-per-mile math on a poorly driven truck is severe. Amazon added a 3.5 percent fuel surcharge on sellers this week. JetBlue raised baggage fees. Fuel surcharges across the industry are being repriced upward. Carriers with tightly managed driver fuel performance will be able to better absorb this environment than those that are not. That is not a complicated concept. It is basic operational arithmetic.
What you should do
Stop using CDL in lieu of a road test as a default practice. The regulation permits it. Use it selectively on drivers whose performance history you can genuinely verify through prior employment documentation and direct references from people who watched them drive. For everyone else, ride along. Bring someone who knows what to look for. Watch the following distance. Watch the throttle. Watch how they handle grades. Watch how they manage space in traffic. Watch whether they are driving the truck or just occupying the seat while the truck drives itself.
Integrate a fuel-economy component into your driver performance review process. If you have ELDs and telematics, you already have the data. You know who is idling excessively, who is hammering the throttle, who is running 72 miles per hour on the interstate and who is managing speed and following distance like a professional. Use that data the same way you use safety scores. If a driver is in the bottom quartile of your fleet on fuel economy and the behavior data shows aggressive throttle and brake inputs, that driver is costing you money every day they are on the board.
Understand that the Iran situation is not resolving quickly. Even with a ceasefire in place, analysts are saying it will take months for regional production to normalize and that prices are unlikely to return to pre-war levels in the near term. The EIA’s own projections put Brent above $95 through the second quarter. A Macquarie analysis assigned a 40 percent probability to $200-per-barrel crude if the conflict extends into summer. You are operating in an elevated fuel cost environment for the foreseeable future. The most durable adjustment you can make to your cost structure right now does not require capital. It requires standards.
The CDL tells you someone passed a test. The road test tells you whether they can actually do the job. In a diesel environment that just moved 50 percent in five weeks, the difference between those two things is not academic. It is a budget.
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