Auto Transport Tips: Give Yourself Time!
One of the hardest things for any company in the auto transport industry to do is truly guarantee a pickup date.
There are so many factors that go into delaying your pickup and delivery times by hours or even days – traffic, mechanical failure, scheduling conflicts, problems with other customers, lack of communication, the list goes on.
But the fact is that most of the time you won’t be able to get your vehicle picked up on a specific day unless you give yourself and your shipping company plenty of time to find a carrier and have them arrive on that specific day.
You want to try and book your shipment at least ten days out if you need a guaranteed pickup date, but two weeks might be even better. This gives your auto transport company plenty of time to search for a carrier that is or will be in your area that can pick up the vehicle on that specific day.
Also, when it comes to the actual pickup time, you want to be sure that you give yourself 24-48 hours of clear schedule because your auto transport carrier could very well show up at any time.
Sometimes it can be as long as 72 hours. We’re talking the actual pickup time here, not the amount of time you’re waiting for your carrier to get there. Once your carrier is close you and the driver will communicate regarding specific times and locations.
More often than not you’ll have to meet your auto transporter somewhere – usually a large parking lot – because they won’t be able to navigate the surface streets due to either the size of their truck or local ordinances forbidding trucks of their size on surface streets (and that’s a lot more common than you’d think).
However, the fact that you have to clear your schedule and basically wait for the carrier to call you within a 2-3 day window is frustrating, which is why many carriers opt to pickup or deliver vehicles around the weekend. It only takes an hour or so from the time your shipper arrives to your vehicle actually leaving, so it’s not like it’s an all-day thing, but it’s something that can happen pretty much at any time during that 2-3 day pickup window.
Since 2007 Dave has written all the content and blogs for American Auto Shipping and during this time added the duties of customer support and transport logistics.
He currently resides in Washington with his three kids and their mom and cat. A fan of Marvel movies and good stories, when not shipping cars Dave can be found working on his novel, enjoying a good book or playing some tournament HALO.
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