
Some brokers have started operating their own fleet of vehicles, and many carriers have grown to be able to offer superior insurance packages and premium options such as different transport types and door to door services.Ĥ. Today, however, the line between broker and carrier is often blurred. Carriers were considered the budget approach that required customers to assume some responsibility for coordinating the move themselves, and even accept some elements of risk. The prevailing opinion in the industry used to be (don’t ask me how she found this out) that brokers served clients who were willing to pay premiums in exchange for zero hassle. On the other hand, because brokers are effectively intermediaries, their services are generally more expensive too. This means that brokers can generally offer more options than a single carrier does. Brokers often work with multiple car carrier companies, the guys physically hauling your vehicle. Generally speaking, brokers are larger organizations. There are two types of companies in the car transport industry, brokers and carriers.

The type of business you hire is also an important factor to consider. Car Transportation Cost: Brokers vs Carriersīut the cost to ship a car isn’t only determined by the road. Los Angeles, CA, to Boston, MA (2,982 miles)īrownsville, TX, to El Paso, TX (829 miles)Ĭheyenne, WY, to Little Rock, AR (1,057 miles)ģ. Car transportation costs were getting complicated already. It is much cheaper to ship your car along well established routes because it requires less time and fuel. By doing this, variables such as fuel cost and the remoteness of pickup and delivery locations are taken into account. When shipping a car, the transport company will calculate the distance as a unit of distance per time, or miles/hr. The way car transport companies factor distance is also something we had to consider. The cost to ship a car shorter distances was closer to a dollar a mile, but this varies by company. You should expect to pay around $50 per every 100 miles for long distance car transport. But the main factor, I’ve learned, is the distance. There were other terms tossed around too: through rates, the bill of landing, accessorials, agents, brokerage licenses, and common carriers. Things like delivery time, insurance, and the type of vehicle you want to transport are among the most important factors that decide the true cost to ship a car. From that point on I merely listened, and this is what I learned about car transportation costs:Ģ. Then she looked at me for an uncomfortably long time before returning to her notes.

She then presented me with an even more detailed estimate of her own, that a bare bones cross-country trip would cost upwards of $1800 for the four of us. But she made sure my suggestion was dead and buried by first presenting me with an online estimate that the cost of shipping the car would be around $1100. That was the end of my road trip suggestion. Besides, a road trip would be even more expensive. We didn’t need a 10 day travel nightmare, and we could afford the door to door transport cost. Erin then told me lots of things which boiled down to one point and one rhetorical question: that a few hours on a plane were enough for her and enough for the kids, and whether I had any idea how much it costs to ship a car. I, foolishly in retrospect, told her we didn’t need to pay for car shipping and suggested taking the boys on a cross-country adventure to Boston. She had several hundred Chrome tabs open, but when I entered the room, she was playing with an online calculator that estimates the cost of shipping a car. What my wife had been calling me about was the model year of our family car. I learned a lot, whether I wanted to or not, and thought I should share it. What followed was the longest conversation about the cost of shipping a car that I think has ever taken place. By the fourth time she called, I knew I was going to be involved whether I liked it or not. I pretended I didn’t hear her and went back to eating out of the refrigerator. I was confused, things couldn’t have been so bad that we had to sell the car. But 10 minutes later she called for me saying something about my car.

As soon as I was sure she was transfixed to her computer, I promptly slipped out of the room. As we sat down to calculate everything, it soon became clear that my wife would be in charge of the calculations. We had to make this transition work, but our expenses were piling up faster than we’d anticipated. If we wanted to keep the kids alive through their first New England winter, we needed to reevaluate our upcoming expenses. One Friday night three weeks before we were due to move cross-country, my wife Erin and I realized that we needed to do some emergency accounting.
