In this post, we will focus on the car moving issue.
Main decision to take is: do I drive the car myself or hiring a company to do it for me?
Before making that decision, there are some questions to ask:
1. What is the distance? What is the road condition? Would it take few days to get there?
2. Would you travel with your family or alone?
3. Will my car handle the distance well?
4. What will be the cost to ship it with a company?
5. What will it cost to drive it?
6. how much your time worth?
In order to take a good decision, you would need to consider the questions above carefully.
If the distance is not too big, your car is in a great condition and it's fairly an easy ride - go ahead and drive it. Save the time and the money.
If you traveling with wife and kids, that changes the game completely! in this case you would need to check for places to stop on the way to eat, rest or sleep. You would have to calculate in the cost of gas, food, hotel and tolls. Another factor is the time. When traveling with more people, there are more stops to make specially when there are kids involve.
Is your car is good, mechanically, for the trip? if it's a long trip you would like to make sure you not going to get stuck in the middle with a car failure.
Check with a car transport company or two, what would be the cost to ship your car. We, the car transport brokers, use carriers for to transport the vehicles. Car carriers usually can carry 6-10 vehicles. That means that you sharing the cost with the other cars. Open car transport is cheaper than enclosed car transport.
Calculate how much gas it will cost you if you going to drive it yourself, add cost of food and hotel if needs too.
What is your time worth? Can you take off for a few days in order to drive the car?
Let's do a quick test. Let's say, we need to move from Miami to Los Angeles and we have a 2005 Honda civic. Driving the car will take approximately 5-6 days. We looking at around 2,750 miles. If the car is in good condition it consume average of 32 miles per gallon. The price per gallon is changing from state to state on the way but let's go on average of $3.5 per gallon. Just for the gas itself you already got $300-350. Food and hotel, considering you going motel 6 and eating at burger king all the time we looking at additional $400-450 at least. So, we already at $700-800 on the cost. To ship a car with a transporter will cost about $900.
From this quick example we can see it is not making any sense to drive the car. Between the mileage you put on the car and the additional costs you got and more than all the time, 5-6 days just to be on the road. It is making more sense in this situation to ship the car with a car transport company.
Call us to discuss your car shipping needs at (818) 532-2180 or email us.