How to Know When Shipping a Vehicle Costs You Less

It happens. You read an article online about a new car and want one immediately. No local dealerships carry it though. You found it at an out-of-state dealership, but on the other side of the country. You’re searching for the ideal used vehicle, and you find it – in another region of the US. The great price aside, how would you get it home?

Vehicle Shipping Costs

You could use a car shipping service or make a vacation out of the trip, then drive home. Which idea better fits your tight budget? Probably the shipping service and here’s why.

When you ship, the vehicle travels on a big rig trailer that transports between eight and 10 vehicles at once. That means you share the trip with others also, transporting their vehicle. Plus, the cost per mile to ship a vehicle drops with the distance transported. According to Consumer Affairs magazine, to ship a vehicle 500 miles or fewer costs an average of about $1.25 per mile, but to ship it coast to coast drops that per mile cost to roughly 55 cents per mile.

Driving It Home Could Cost More

It could cost you much less per mile to ship than to drive it yourself. Of course, this may not ring true for very short trips across state lines. For example, purchase by an Oklahoma City resident of a vehicle in Dallas, TX, would cost about $33 – a tank of gas or less – for the drive home, according to the travel calculator website Travel Math.

You can use Travel Math to figure out the travel costs of any US trip, whether driving or flying. So, let’s compare the costs of long-distance vehicle purchase. These costs factor heavily on the true costs of that great used car deal you spotted or the value of purchasing that new vehicle, only available in New York or California.

Boston to Los Angeles

You reside in Boston, MA, but your dream car lives in Los Angles. The average cost Consumer Affairs found for shipping that distance equals an outlay of $1,650. Flying from Boston to LA costs $308 to $417 one-way. Driving the vehicle home costs $597.71 for gas, hotel costs of one night locally, $104 (LA), and three nights on the road while driving the 2,982 miles across the country. That’s one night in Moab, UT at $97 once you’ve put the first 727 miles behind you, at the halfway point between LA and Boston, $65 (Omaha, Nebraska), and a night in a hotel in Detroit, MI at $57.

Your plane flight to LA You’ll need to feed yourself, too. That’s three meals per day, plus snacks and coffee or sodas to stay awake while you drive, which costs an average of $180 for a cross-country trip due to price variations.

When you tally up all of that, the costs of some of the cheapest options using Priceline cost $1,511.71. That’s before you add in the cost of you taking time off from work to do this. Unless you have paid leave available, you won’t make money during the road trip. Assuming that you make about $15 per hour and work eight hours per day, before taxes you make $120 each day. This trip requires you to take five days off. That comes to $600.

In Conclusion

Do the math before you decide how to pick up that great vehicle you found online. While you might assume that driving it home yourself costs less, in many cases, it costs less to ship it and have someone else do the driving.