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How to prepare your car for a perfect shipping experience

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Home  |  Car Transport   |   How to prepare your car for a perfect shipping experience

Moving from one place to the next can be a time consuming and stressful experience. Not only will you need to move all of your personal belongings, but you may also need to move your vehicles if it is too far to drive. Fortunately, there are car shipping services that can handle this for you. There are several tips that should be followed that could help you to have the perfect shipping experience when you are shipping your car.

Know the Agreement

Whenever you are shipping your car, the first thing you need to understand is the shipping agreement for your vehicle. A shipping agreement for a vehicle can be a complicated agreement. You need to make sure that you fully understand all of your responsibilities, the costs associated with shipping your vehicle, and when you will be able to get your vehicle back. This will help to ensure that you are fully aware of the entire process and know what you need to do to make sure this process goes as smoothly as possible.

Clean it and Take Pictures

Before you put your vehicle into a shipping container, you should make sure that it is fully cleaned out of time. When you have your vehicle please, you will be able to easily identify any existing scratches, dents, or other imperfections inside and outside of it. You should then take pictures of your vehicle and make inventory of any things that is wrong with it. When you get your vehicle back, this will make it easier to identify it whether or not something was wrong or happened to your car during the shipping process.

Take Personal Items

If you have any personal items in your vehicle make sure that you have them taken out before you your vehicle shipped. Any items, including loose change, important documents, or other personal items should be taken with you and stored with your other personal belongings. This will make sure that nothing gets lost during the shipping process.

Disable Alarm

During the shipping process, your car may be tilted and stored in a manner that could affect the car alarm. To ensure the alarm does not go off inadvertently, you should have it turned off. The shipping service should be able to help you with this if you do not know how to do it.

Get it Checked

You should have your car checked before having it shipped. This will include making sure you have adequate levels of oil and gas, proper tire pressure, and no leaks. Any minor issues your car has should be fixed before shipping.

Insurance

Before you purchase any shipping policy, you should also make sure that you are properly covered by insurance. Depending on the type of auto insurance you have, your vehicle may not be covered for any commercial shipping purposes. If this is the case, you should consider getting additional auto insurance from the shipping company. This will provide you with a variety of types of protection.

Frequently Asked Questions

Honest Answers to Your Car Shipping Questions

Yes, we always ask for your specific pickup and delivery addresses, if the carrier can get right to the addresses you provide, they will. If the addresses that you give us are not safely accessible for a Multi-car carrier, however, you will need to make arrangements with the driver to meet at a nearby location where the carrier can safely get in and out.

People do it all the time (rarely for free) but the official answer is no.

Not what you wanted to hear, we know, but that is the honest answer.

We are not licensed to broker the shipment of household goods and, likewise, no car carrier that operates in the USA is licensed to transport them from state to state either. Despite what you might be being told by other car shipping companies you may speak with.

Remember, at the end of the day we're all salespeople, and the true answer to this question is not a great selling point.

You will hear a lot of companies tell you that you can put up to 100 pounds of items in the trunk, but that is not entirely true. That fact is that items of that amount are fairly common and the department of transportation is probably not going to split hairs and fine the trucker over items of that amount, provided they are not over their weight limit. They could fine them, however, if they see a vehicle stuffed full of personal items so the car carrier will most likely try to negotiate something with you to cover themselves against any costs they could incur. It's not something we can build into your contract though.

We have a short and helpful video on this topic in our user videos.

Only in rare cases and car carriers will usually charge a premium to make it happen.

All dates given by car carriers are typically estimates and projections.

For this reason (and to keep your cost down) we ask that you build in some flexibility and give us the earliest possible date you would be WILLING to release the vehicle, even though it may not be your preferred date.

We'll put you in direct contact with your car carrier and the driver will also typically call you the afternoon or evening before your pick up and delivery (they won't just show up unannounced, and if they do we want to hear about it). However, car carriers are out on the road battling traffic, weather and any number of other factors that can and do throw them off of their pickup and delivery projections from time to time.

If the projected dates we give you come and you are unable to make contact with your carrier, please call our office immediately so that we may help resolve the situation.

The average transit time from pick up to delivery on any vehicle going coast to coast will average 7 to 10 days. From there you can figure your transit time based on how far your vehicle is traveling, i.e. from either coast to the Midwest might average 3-7 days.

Yes!

Even better, we do not even ask for payment until we have you confirmed for pickup by a safe, reliable, fully insured, direct car carrier. If for any reason you do not ship your car with the carrier that we arrange for you, there is no fee.

The fees paid directly to the carrier however, (in most cases, their fees are not paid until your vehicle is delivered) are not directly controlled by us, so any requests for a refund of the carrier's portion would need to be addressed with the carrier directly.

Of course! And you are always backed by our Damage Free Guarantee policy.

Part of what you pay us for is to verify that the car carrier that we put you on is covered by the proper amount of insurance and that everything is up to date.

There is never any additional cost to you for this coverage, and their insurance is always primary.

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