In the world of auto transport, there are two types of auto transporters – brokers and auto transporters. The auto transporters are the drivers of the transport trucks, and the brokers are the companies that handle most of the paperwork for the transport as well as the money. The auto transporters drive the trucks that move the vehicles – without them, there would be no auto transport. Auto transporters rely on brokerages to find them customers. Without brokerages, auto transporters would have to do a lot of the work that goes into finding customers, which can be very long and tedious – out on the road, an auto transporter doesn’t have time to constantly be calling people about their auto transport needs and seeing if they want to schedule a pickup with them. So auto transporters rely on the brokerages to find them cars to move.

The best way that auto transporters have of keeping up with the constantly changing auto transport industry is by way of what is known as Central Dispatch. Central Dispatch is a service open to auto transporters and brokerages – it’s essentially a giant load board for auto transporters to pick and choose what they want to move. This makes scheduling and logistics much easier for auto transporters, as they are able to quickly find new pieces of freight depending on where they may or may not be at any given time. This also explains why finding auto transporters in larger cities is easier, as there are more potential customers in a large area than, say, North Dakota.

Auto transporters take freight based on the routes that they are driving, and some routes are more popular to auto transporters than others. For instance, cross country routes from large cities to other large cities are usually pretty easy to find auto transporters on. Many customers move cross country, so auto transporters tend to gravitate to those. Other, smaller routes can be easy to find auto transporters on, as they can do daily or weekly runs and still see their families. The coasts are fairly popular, depending on the time of year – auto transporters work much more in the summer than in the winter, as people tend to move around more in the summer. Something about the weather being nice and helping rejuvenate people.

During the winter season, auto transporters based in Florida and other southern states find more work than in the summer, because of what are known by auto transporters as snow birds – people who move down to the south during the winter to escape the blistering cold of Northeastern winters. Routes that are unpopular in the summer, such as up to Maine, suddenly become a bit more enticing to auto transporters. Be sure to ask your auto shipping broker about when the best time would be to move your vehicle.