Shipping a car

It's been too long to give you any rate/bid advice, but I have shipped a couple of cars from CA to MA and back.

The first shipment from CA to MA was a disaster. I think I picked the shipper on lowest cost, and I got what I paid for. The shipper never showed to pick up my car on the day of my move. Had to drive 30 miles out of my way to drop the car off that day, and had to rent a car to get back to the airport. This after calling to confirm pick up dates/times etc. Then it took them about 4-5 weeks to get my car across country. They missed their committed delivery dates 3 times. I paid a fortune in rental car fees and then I finally did get my car it looked like it had been kept in the NV desert for about 10 years. I could not believe the amount of dust inside the car, much less outside.

Second time was when we moved back. I had such a rotten experience the first time we planned to drive back but work schedule made that impossible. Not only did this second shipper pick up my car in the middle of downtown Boston (which was a huge plus for us at the time) but they darn near beat us back to the W. Coast. They picked up our cars 2 days before we flew out and I think had my car to me the 2-3rd day after we landed in Seattle. They dropped off the car with my in-laws in perfect condition.

Not sure what you can take away from this as the first shipper committed to pick up / delivery times etc. and simply just ignored them. The second I barely talked to and executed flawlessly. I think my advice would be to go with a big company - The second company was a subcontractor of Mayflower so perhaps had some SLAs they had to meet where the first company was the equivalent of Joe's Car Shipping Co. from middleofNowhere USA and probably had some sort of shipping network they relied on to actually move my car so I was at the mercy of weather, driver availability, phase of the moon etc.

You shipped your in-laws in the car?

Don't be silly, they were strapped to the roof