Learn essential tips for safely shipping your vehicle, from choosing the right carrier to preparing your car and handling post-shipping inspections.
The following is a guest post from my bloggy friend Taylor McKnight on behalf of Best Oil Company LLC. Interested in having a guest post on my website? Click here for my guest post submission form.
Key takeaways from this post:
– Understanding open vs. closed transport options
– Factors affecting shipping costs
– Vehicle preparation requirements
– Carrier selection criteria
– Insurance considerations and requirements
– Scheduling best practices
– Post-shipping inspection procedures
– Pros and cons of car shipping services
Everything You Need to Know About Auto Transport Services
Auto transport companies deliver vehicles for customers to far-away places or to special events. If you’re moving or participating in a race or show, these tips can help you in deciding what is involved with car shipping, protecting your vehicle, handling damage to it, and whether you should use a car shipper at all.
What to Know About Car Shipping
Open v. Closed Transport
One of your choices involves whether to keep the vehicle in the open air or put it in a closed trailer. The latter approach proves preferable if you are shipping a collector, custom, or racing vehicle. In particular, these kinds of vehicles come with unique features and may have higher values than passenger cars or trucks.
Closed transport protects your vehicles from rain, dust, smoke, sun, and other elements. With the open approach comes the risk of rocks, limbs, debris, or other things leaving dings and scratches. Closed transport comes with a premium.
Where to Leave and Get the Car
Terminal-to-terminal service calls for you to take the vehicle to a lot owned or controlled by the shipping company. With terminals, the company can get multiple vehicles onto a trailer. The driver will have a single place to retrieve and leave vehicles.
Door-to-door service may require the driver to navigate narrow, curved, or steep roads. Depending on where you live, the shipper might not offer door-to-door service. You likely will pay more than with terminal-to-terminal because of the distance that the driver may have from the company’s facility to a particular location.
Pricing Factors
In addition to open versus closed and terminal or custom locations, the price of vehicle shipping takes into account the following factors and features:
– Size. Expect generally to pay more for trucks and SUVs, as they weigh more than passenger vehicles and take more space. Longer vehicles also require more space and reduce the number of cars a shipper can take on a single trip.
– Season. Demand for car shipping follows the particular time of the year. Spring and summer months bring occasions for vacations, auto races, and car shows. Residents of more northern locales may head southward for the winter months and need car shippers. Beyond these peak times, a long-distance relocation of corporate headquarters or transitions in federal government administrations may spike demand in certain areas at certain times.
– Destinations. Not surprisingly, where your vehicle is headed impacts price. The destination presents the issue of distance. Longer trips for the shipper mean more in gas prices, which the shipper passes along to you. Places considerably away from a major or primary highway reduce fuel efficiency and add to the required distances. As you read above, you may face a premium for door-to-door service because you may live along a road that is difficult for the driver to traverse. Metropolitan areas see higher demand for shipping services due to population and the number of businesses and employers.
How To Prepare Your Car Before Being Shipped
Getting your vehicle ready for shipment aims to preserve the vehicle’s condition, your rights and claims for damage, and your security. Without proper maintenance, the shipper might deflect responsibility for damage during the trip upon you. Leaving things in the car exposes your identity and personal information to use by thieves and scammers.
To have your vehicle in proper condition:
– Clean the car. Wash, vacuum, detail the interior, and wax. A coat of wax helps repel rain or insects that your car might encounter. Remove dust from the interiors. You might even apply tire spray.
– Check the tires. Consult your vehicle owner’s manual or the inside of the door for recommended tire pressure. Replace any tires that appear worn or lack tread of more than 2/32-inch deep.
– Confirm that your lights and turn signals work properly. Your owner’s manual will tell you the types of bulbs for tail lights, headlights, and turn signals if some have malfunctioned.
– Change the oil and air filter.
– Check the brakes.
After the maintenance, photograph or record by video the car. This lets you document any pre-existing damage or imperfections or demonstrate that no such conditions exist. You may need this evidence should the carrier dispute your claim of damage during the car shipment.
Get your car as light as you reasonably can. Too much weight on your car could affect the trailer or vehicle hauling yours. To that end, the vehicle normally should have no more than one-fourth of a tank of gas when you take it to the shipping terminal or establishment. Other than the spare tire or jumper cables, remove anything you have left in the trunk, back seat, or even front seat. These include books, the glove box, tools, clothes, boxes, car seats, harnesses for restraints, and computers.
Keeping personal items in the car might invite thieves or result in damage. Identity thieves may scrounge for registration information, driver’s licenses, credit card statements or receipts, or bank records that you neglect to remove from the car.
The shipper will need a key. If you have more than one, give the spare key you keep the others.
Tips when shipping your car
Selecting Your Carrier
Start the shipping process by choosing the right one for you. Reviews on Google and the Better Business Bureau provide glimpses of customers’ experiences and their perceptions of responsiveness to customer questions or concerns, handling of damage claims, and the prompt shipping of vehicles.
Include visits to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in your research. By federal law, car shippers must have an “MC Docket” number and USDOT number. From these numbers, you can determine if the carrier has a valid registration for car shipping. Beware of companies that do not display the MC number or USDOT number prominently on vehicles or online sites.
The registration requirements apply to automobile brokers as well as automobile shippers. Brokers do not directly ship cars but arrange with shippers to serve you. By using a broker, you might not get full information about the driver or company actually transporting your automobile.
Learn the insurance carried by the shipper. Under federal law, shippers must carry at least $5,000 in cargo insurance. Depending on the company and the number of vehicles carried by a single trailer, coverage for cargo ranges between $175,000 and $500,000. Those companies that haul classic, custom, exotic, or racing cars should have much more, perhaps as much as $1 million. Ask the company to provide proof of cargo insurance.
Scheduling
Booking your shipment entails considerable planning. You should have a good idea of when you need the car at a particular destination. If a job requires you to relocate suddenly, car shipping might not work if you need the vehicle immediately or almost immediately when you arrive at the new place. As a rule of thumb, you should book car shipping for at least two to three weeks before you need to ship, perhaps even a month.
Peak times, such as from May to September, may prove much more challenging in scheduling. With the high demand comes limited slots to book shipping.
Build into your planning a cushion for transportation delays. Snow, severe thunderstorms, flooding, earthquakes, and hurricanes can slow car shippers. The conditions may keep your driver off the road for some time or require diversions onto longer and indirect routes to either your home or the terminal.
Post-Ship Inspection
When the car arrives at its destination, thoroughly inspect it for any signs of damage or malfunction that did not exist when you placed it with the shipper. Check for cracks, dings, scratches, tire damage, and broken lights. Take photographs or a video of the car at the time you pick it up and compare it with the pre-trip videos or photos.
Why You Should Ship Your Car
Car shipping brings convenience and more. Without a car shipper, a long-distance move or trip subjects you to hundreds or perhaps more than a thousand miles of driving. This means potentially overnight stays, hundreds spent on gas, wear-and-tear on your vehicle, and the risk of damage to your vehicle or injury to you from a crash. Fatigue can rear itself. If you have college students far away, car shipping resolves your concerns about the inexperience of your young ones taking long trips.
With a multi-state, cross country, or other long-distance trek comes the risk of a mechanical failure. Chances are the malfunction will happen on a lonely stretch of highway miles away from any service station or establishment to take refuge. Responsible car shipping companies afford protection and security against car thefts.
The Negatives of Not Having or Driving Your Car
You relinquish certain control when you engage a car shipping company. The arrival of your car at the new destination rests in the company’s hands rather than yours. Weather, traffic, or other events could delay when the shipper delivers your car. If you reach your new home or destination before the car, you may have to rent a vehicle or find other alternate means of transportation.
With the car shipping approach, you must place faith in the competence and care of the company and drivers. Damage can happen to the windows, body, and parts of the vehicle while in transport. You might have difficulty getting straight answers on how the damage occurred and who might be responsible.
