Most of the time when you are looking to ship a car, you are asked to pay part of the payment on a credit card, and the balance COD to the driver. There are several reasons that companies ask you to pay COD or Cash On Delivery, one of which is for the driver to always have cash in the truck. While drivers are on the road they often use the cash to pay for their fuel, which can be very expensive. Driver’s also use this cash when they have minor breakdowns or need a new tire. Another reason for paying COD instead of putting it all on the credit card is that when a car transport company processes a credit card they are charged a percentage of what they charge. Since it is a competitive industry they try to avoid paying any fees that are not necessary. The only time you should be concerned about payment is if the company is asking you to pay a deposit prior to pickup as sometimes these companies are not reputable and can lead to difficulties for you later down the road with getting your car moved.

Determining the price of car transport varies based on if it is on an open trailer or an enclosed trailer. On an enclosed auto transport, the price is typically based on the actual miles driven with your vehicle. Based on fuel that rate per mile will change, and based on the distance the rate per mile will come down. Most enclosed trucks have a minimum, so even if you are moving your car 10 minutes on an enclosed trailer, there will be a minimum fee depending on the company. On an open car transport the rate is calculated totally differently. Open trailer rates are more based on a given route. For example, the rate Texas to Florida can often be less expensive that from Florida to Texas. Things like, fuel, supply & demand and availability are all factors that are considered when going on an open transport. As long as you have a good carrier and you them what you are wanting to achieve you should not have a problem despite who you go with.

Often we hear people that are looking for the cheapest auto transport quote when they are searching for a company to help them with their car shipping. There are a few things that we have constantly heard over the years that we think it is important to pass along to consumers. First and most important is check out the reputation of these companies who are talking about these “great rates.” From our experience companies with these rates are often either very new in business and under bid the prices from lack of experience, or have a reputation for misrepresentation. The best way is to look for yourself on the Better Business Bureau. The second vital point is make sure if you do decide to let one of these companies book a shipment for you that you do NOT prepay anything to them. They often say it is their company policy, and the reason for that is once they have a couple hundred dollars from you, they know you will not want to cancel and forfeit that money quickly.

An option to consider if your kids are going to college somewhere far away outside the state, is to have them fly there and arrange for car shipping to their university. This option is not applicable for every student, of course, most of those in state would be better off to make the short commute themselves. However, if your son or daughter is going cross country or even several hundred miles away, it may give you some peace of mind knowing they aren’t driving tired or having to make such a long trip alone. Give us a call and let us give you an auto transport quote and then you can make the safest decision for your child on getting them safely to college.

A request that people make to us is if we can do specific pickup or delivery dates. In some cases this is possible as part of our normal service because we have drivers almost daily in some areas of the US. In other major cities we can make this happen but typically there will be an additional fee for such a service. In order to ensure a guaranteed delivery date, one of our auto movers who is doing the long haul portion of the transport needs to get your vehicle into the city usually 1-3 days prior to the scheduled or desired delivery date. Then, that terminal will have one of its local drivers bring the car to you on that day. This local terminal service is where the additional fee comes in.
The same thing applies for the pickup of your car on a given day, if our driver happens to be passing through that city on that day and time it will load directly on the truck. However, that is rare so we typically have a local terminal go and pickup your car and safely store it until we can be there to have it loaded onto our auto carriers.

We are very pleased to announce that American Auto Movers launched our new website yesterday. We have added all kinds of new and useful content that will hopefully be useful in educating you on how the industry works. We have included several new pages like tips to ship a car and a breakdown of the entire auto shipping process. We hope you find the information helpful and we look forward to hearing from you.

Something I think almost all Americans can get behind is creating more jobs here at home and reducing pollution into the environment.  At American Auto Movers, we are not scientist so we can’t prove if the green house effect is real or not, but what we do know is that lots of people driving with fossil fuels does create pollution and some green options for truck drivers and auto movers would help bring jobs here in the US.  Those are things we think most Americans can support.  It still isn’t clear if hydrogen, natural gas, biodiesel or a combination of those will end up being the source of fuel for the future generation.  Obviously politics, like most major changes, will play a role to some degree.  North America has a very large supply of natural gas as well as Russia.  This is something many Americans are leaning towards because it would bring a lot of jobs from overseas to the US specifically for the reason of using this fuel.  Research is being done by many large corporations to decide what will be the most useful fuel and have the least amount of environmental damages.  Regardless of what direction the transport industry takes on the matter the team at American Auto Movers is excited to see where this takes us.