While we ship cars on a global scale from the US and Canada, one thing we don’t do is ship cars between the US and Canada. The reason is we use ships to move our customers’ vehicles overseas. In this blog post, we will be talking about how you can save money shipping cars from the US to Canada or the other way around. For starters, there are mainly two types of car shipping methods commonly used to transport cars back and forth between the US and Canada.
The 1st car shipping method, and by far the most common, is the open-transport-truck method. Normally these are trucks independently operated. The truck driver is normally the business owner and works for himself. Many of these truck drivers have their own routes very much like a paper route. They drive to the same locations every week or so. Some have a route the expands across the entire United States while others only cover Canada and the northern US. Every situation is different. I want to use and example to help demonstrate a typical car shipment from Vancouver, BC Canada to Miami, FL USA. While there are some transport truck drivers who will drive all the way across the country, many times a car will be transferred from one truck to another. Think about this like the greyhound bus or an airline. It is more efficient for them to operate using transfers. A car being shipped from Vancouver Canada will probably be transported to a major meeting area for transport truckers, like Denver. While in Denver, the car will be transferred to another truck driver who runs routes between Miami and Denver. The problem is that most independent transport truckers don’t have the capacity to arrange all the logistics between all the other people who run routes across the US. This means that “you” will have to handle the logistics of getting your car picked up in Vancouver and oversee the transfer all the way through to Miami. This can be a cumbersome experience. In this situation, you can use two options. Go onto Central Dispatch or find a company that can ship a car to Canada like AA Auto Transport.
The 2nd car shipping method is using a closed tranport truck service. This car shipping method is used much less often because it’s more expensive. In addition, while an open transport truck can carry 10 cars and split the cost of fuel, a closed transport truck can only carry up to three cars. The main reason someone would use a closed truck would be to protect the car from nature’s elements. If we follow the example we used above, shipping a car from Vancouver Canada to Miami could be super expensive. The person shipping the car may in fact have to pay a FULL round trip price for the open transport trucker because normally a closed transport trucker doesn’t have long distant routes like open transport truckers do. Normally we recommend this car shipping method if a person is shipping an exotic vehicle like a Bentley or Ferrari.
For those of you who want to permanently export your car to or from Canada, you will have to report this to US Customs or Canadian Customs and the DMV for the appropriate state. If you have any questions regarding anything on this blog post or want to comment, please do so below.