For anyone who has had are car shipped. What is the avg price per mile one should expect to pay? I am thinking of shipping from either Houston or Dallas TX to Buffalo NY area?
Careful what info you give out. Those guys will spam the living sh!t out of you once you request a quote.
What I found when I shipped my car (about 4 years ago, ~ $700 from Philadelphia to Minneapolis) is that there really weren't any car hauling companies. What they were was a 1-2 person operation that listed your car on some sort of national database that the actual transporters (independents) used. If the transporters saw a car needing to go a direction they were already planning, or willing to travel, for a decent cost they would accept the bid and do the work.
I "hired" a company to transport my car for a price I thought was pretty good. After a few weeks of nothing actually happening, I called a new company. This is what they explained to me above. I called the original company back, verified it was essentially true, had them up the $ amount a couple hundred (from something like $500 to something like $700, I forget exactly), and that was accepted almost right away and the car picked up a few days later. I talked to the transporter when I met him to pick up the car and he was just a guy with a big truck, working for himself.
In the end it didn't seem to matter what company you use, they were just middlemen, and the cost was simply determined by what the going rate is at the time for the people actually doing the work.
jlee's company mentioned above may actually be a company, and there may well be a lot of them, but it sure didn't seem to be the case to me a few years ago.
What I found when I shipped my car (about 4 years ago, ~ $700 from Philadelphia to Minneapolis) is that there really weren't any car hauling companies. What they were was a 1-2 person operation that listed your car on some sort of national database that the actual transporters (independents) used. If the transporters saw a car needing to go a direction they were already planning, or willing to travel, for a decent cost they would accept the bid and do the work.
I "hired" a company to transport my car for a price I thought was pretty good. After a few weeks of nothing actually happening, I called a new company. This is what they explained to me above. I called the original company back, verified it was essentially true, had them up the $ amount a couple hundred (from something like $500 to something like $700, I forget exactly), and that was accepted almost right away and the car picked up a few days later. I talked to the transporter when I met him to pick up the car and he was just a guy with a big truck, working for himself.
In the end it didn't seem to matter what company you use, they were just middlemen, and the cost was simply determined by what the going rate is at the time for the people actually doing the work.
jlee's company mentioned above may actually be a company, and there may well be a lot of them, but it sure didn't seem to be the case to me a few years ago.