When you’re moving across several states and need to get your car shipped to your new location, where do you get the information you need to make that happen? Do you go online and start looking for quotes from auto transport companies? That’s what most people do.
But where is that quote really coming from? Can you trust it? Should you take it at face value? Let’s take a look.
Where Is Your Car Shipping Quote Coming From?
Lots of websites offer automated online price quotes for shipping your vehicle. If you’ve tried a few, you may have been surprised at how much the quotes differed. That’s because the quote you received when you used an online car shipping calculator may not have actually come from a car transport company.
Why Automated Online Price Quotes Are Bad News
Of course, many legitimate car shipping companies use online car shipping calculators as a starting place to help determine the fair cost of transporting your car across long distances.
But not all those calculators are coming from legit auto transport companies. Some are just websites specifically to generate leads. Once you’ve interacted with the calculator, that lead-generating website, whomever it belongs to, has your personal information. The site can now sell that information to other companies, making money off it.
When you enter your information into one of these lead-generating calculators, you’ll start to receive calls from companies that want your business — up to a dozen calls in a few hours, often. But you don’t know anything about these companies. Can they deliver the services they’ve promised? You don’t know. Is the quote they’re giving you (which may sound temptingly low) a legitimate quote? Again, you have no way to know.
Often these companies offer you an unrealistically low quote to get your business, only to zing you with after-the-fact charges. These occur after your car’s been transported and before it’s been delivered to you, so you’re stuck paying them if you want your vehicle. Typically, the extra charges are indeed legitimate charges that should have been included in the original quote, which, you realize too late, didn’t really define the elements of your move correctly.
So what can you do? Keep reading.
The Value of a (Free!) Customized Car Shipping Quote
When you get a customized quote prepared by hand, you know you’re getting a realistic quote calculated by an expert in logistics, not by a piece of software. Our logistics experts take into consideration the current supply and demand to offer realistic prices, including finding you discounts on your chosen route whenever possible.
Take a look at the factors that go into your customized quote:
- The type of auto transport truck. If your car can ship on an open carrier rather than in an enclosed one, more options are available, which means lower rate.
- The distance between your pickup and delivery locations. But distance isn’t necessarily the major factor. We can often use larger carriers for longer distances, which means you’re splitting the cost with other people having their cars transported.
- Supply and demand. During busy times of the year, car shipping companies that hand out quotes that are too low often find themselves shunted to the back of the line in favor of companies that gave realistic quotes. Can you afford that extra delay waiting for your car to arrive?
- Your exact pickup and delivery locations. If you live in a transportation hub such as New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, you’re likely to get a better price than if you live in a small town off the beaten path.
Give us a call to get an honest, accurate car shipping quote today.
