Ford Motor Co. has released some preliminary findings from an ongoing experiment tracking the behavior of drivers in Hewlett-Packard's fleet. The companies gave a June 15 presentation at the Global Fleet Conference.

Earlier this year, Ford installed OBD-II ports in 100 H-P fleet vehicles to gather information about where drivers stop for gas or get their oil changed. The device also collected data about routing, speed, and elapsed travel time and sent it back to Ford via a cloud server.

For the first few months of the study, Ford noticed three primary observations about the behavior of H-P drivers.

Most drivers visited the same national coffee house and refueled with the same brand of gasoline, the study found. Traveling employees often left their vehicles unused at the airport for days. These vehicles may be utilized more effictively by nearby drivers. Also, 70 percent of trips took place during weekdays and typical trip distances were 13 miles or less.

The trips fell into four groups, including city block driving, freeway driving, non rush-hour driving, and rush-hour driving.

City block driving, which accounted for 34 percent of tripe, involved frequent direction changes, driving near the speed limit, idling at stoplights with short distances.

Freeway driving (21 percent) involved few driving direction changes with large deviations from the speed-limit depending on traffic, and long trip durations and driving distances with less stop and go than City Block Commute.

Non rush-hour driving (29 percent) showed short trip duration and short distances with less stops and idling. Rush-hour driving (16 percent) also involved short trip duration and short distances with frequent stops and idling during peak drive hours.

Editor's note: Look for a detailed overview of this project in an upcoming issue of Automotive Fleet.