You would be surprised at how many people go into their car transport without knowing anything about car transport or how it works. This can lead to major problems later on down the line, so we’ve compiled a helpful guide to help you avoid some of the problems associated with car transport. Read on to find out how you can avoid all the problems that people come up against when dealing with car transport and car transport companies.

The first thing that you should always do is read the car transport company’s terms and conditions. Those terms and conditions are incredibly important to know and to understand, because that’s what the car transport company will always fall back on should something happen. This doesn’t mean anything bad – it’s just important that you know what the terms are in case there is a misunderstanding between you and the car transport company. Often times a representative of the car transport company will tell the customer one thing, but in fact the representative was saying something else – a miscommunication occurs, and in the car transport industry miscommunications can mean missed pickup times or even cancelled bookings.

An important term to understand is the pickup window. Your pickup window is exactly that: a range of dates that your vehicle is expected to be picked up in. If you are given a pickup window of one to ten days by your car transport representative, that means that it will take one to ten days to assign your car to a car transport carrier and for that car transport carrier to arrive to pickup your vehicle. It doesn’t mean that it will take one to ten days for your vehicle to arrive at your destination – that’s called transit time.

A quick note about transit times: they are pretty much standard in the industry. Some larger car transport companies have teams of drivers that can run the vehicle pretty much 24 hours a day, but teams are relatively uncommon, and most individual car transport drivers can only drive a maximum of 350 miles per day. Therefore, most transit times will be the same from company to company – they can’t control how fast the trucks go.

Another thing to be very clear on is the cancellation and refund policies of your car transport companies. Some car transport companies impose a cancellation fee for cancelling your order before your pickup window is past, and if you don’t know about it ahead of time, you could have some serious problems later on. Other companies have refund processing periods – these are mostly larger companies like ours. Refund processing periods are common – it takes time to gather the information and most of the time it’s just one person doing all the accounting in those car transport companies, so there’s usually some kind of back log. However, it’s important to know that if you cancel, you’ll need to wait a certain amount of time – usually 10 to 30 days.

Knowledge is power, as they say, and when it comes to car transport the more knowledge you have, the better decisions you are able to make regarding the car transport company you decide to book your shipment with, and how much you’re willing to pay versus how much you’re willing to let go of for a period of time should you pay and then be forced to cancel. We don’t mean to be negative – quite the opposite, in fact. We want you to be as informed as possible so these miscommunications don’t occur, and we’re all on the same page so there’s no rash decisions being made on account of a misunderstanding.