Car shipping is, in a straightforward meaning, the act of transporting a car as of one location to another. However, there are many nuances to shipping a car that many people are uninformed of, and we’ll try to clear those up here. The first, and probably most major, is the idea of shipping your car on an open carrier, or in an enclosed carrier. Open carriers are just giant trucks with six to ten slots for vehicle (typically there’s ten slots) to fit into. This is called release transport. Enclosed carry is when your car is loaded into a giant container that protects it from inclement weather and different road hazards. Typically, your car is safe on an open carrier, and most car shipping occurs on these types of trucks.
Another difference in car distribution is door-to-door delivery or fatal-to-fatal shipping, and we’ll break that down right now. Gate-to-door shipping is when the truck will come straight to your house and pick up the vehicle, right in front of you. The vast bulk of shipping happen door-to-door, and it is by far the safest and most convenient way to ship your car because you see the vehicle get on top of the truck, where with terminal-to-terminal shipping, you drop your car off at (typically) a junkyard or open lot, and leave your car there until a motor vehicle can come pick it up – now and then months later!
Car delivery is a somewhat simple process, once you know some of the terms involved, and these two included here are the nearly all important two languages you can identify. You normally want to ship your car on an open, ten-car carrier door-to-door – which is something that most transport companies offer anyway. Always verify quotes and shop earlier than booking a shipment, though, and always check those companies out for their reliability before ever book an order.
