Don’t Ship a Car If You Can’t Pay for It
One of the most crucial things in the auto transport industry is actually paying for your shipment. Shipping a vehicle from one part of the country to another is a time-consuming and expensive process for a customer, but it’s even more stressful for the carrier, who has to actually ship those vehicles for all those different customers, all while doing it for as little money as they can (in order to stay competitive in the industry) and as quickly as they can without breaking the law.
Drivers are often on the road for ten hours or more at a time, and have to deal with being able to get their trucks into and out of a variety of different locations quickly. Not only that, but their overhead is really high – they have to spend quite a bit of money to even operate those huge trucks they drive, and keeping them fueled and maintained take a big chunk out of their paychecks.
This is why you should never ship a car if you cannot pay for it come delivery.
This is really a no-brainer, but in today’s day and age a lot of customers think that every industry works the same way; they can pay as little as possible while still getting quality services – but that’s not how the vehicle shipping industry really works. When you ship a vehicle you have to have your payment ready upon delivery.
Most companies will be happy to work with you in getting your vehicle shipped and paid for, but after a point you have a moral and legal responsibility to pay your shipper for transporting and delivering your vehicle. If you don’t pay, your carrier can and likely will hold your vehicle on their truck and not deliver it until they do get paid.
This is obviously something that no one wants to deal with, and while it doesn’t happen very often it does indeed happen. It doesn’t matter why you can’t pay – even if you’ve had a catastrophic emergency, no car transport carrier is going to ship a vehicle for free.
If something comes up and you cannot pay, your vehicle will be held until you can, and many companies will simply drop the vehicle off at a local long-term storage facility where it will stay until you pay the total balance.
Different shippers have different methods of collecting payment from customers, but at the end of the day you won’t get your car if you can’t pay for the shipment, so don’t try to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes – it almost always backfires.
If you’re interested in shipping a vehicle the legitimate way and are trying to find a company that can handle it, we recommend taking a minute to fill out our free online vehicle shipping quote request form. It takes only a minute from start to finish and, when you’re done, you’ll have a free quote built to move your vehicle when it needs shipped. You can also contact us any time, toll-free, to get a quote, speak to an agent, and book your order.
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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