If you are in a hurry and willing to pay extra for expedited service, then you might be wondering if it’s really worth the price tag.

When attempting to expedite a shipment, there are 3 time frames that impact the total transit duration. So we’ll take a look at these to see if throwing money at the problem will create a solution.

Pick Up Window

If it is possible to make your shipment go faster by paying more, this is probably where that happens. All auto shipments start with a pickup window or a range of days that we estimate the vehicle to pick up within. The specific range of estimated days is based on our past experiences with auto shipments that are comparable to yours.

Why do we use a pickup window?

Many factors figure into the answer to this question. However, two factors go into the simplest short answer.

• There is not a car transport carrier in your city, headed to your destination every day of the week. This is even true for large metropolitan cities.
• Even if there is a car transport in your city and headed for your destination on your requested shipping day, it may not be ready to load your vehicle. Car carriers that ship vehicles across the country typically haul 8-10 vehicles per load. With that many pickups and deliveries per load, it can take them multiple days to unload and then reload.

Is it possible to expedite the pickup window?

So the real question is will paying more overcome either of the 2 factors causing your pickup window?
Well, car transport trucks have a finite quantity. Basically, if there is not an available carrier in your area today, paying more will not change that.

Let’s say on the other hand that there is a carrier in your area that has not entirely delivered all of its vehicles, so would typically not start loading yet. Paying more may entice the driver to load your vehicle right away. However, this will probably not change the delivery of your car, as the carrier will still be unloading and reloading in that area for the same amount of time.

Across Country Transit Times

As we have already mentioned, your vehicle will likely be 1 of 8-10 total vehicles on the truck. This means that the car carrier probably has multiple pickups and deliveries to make for each load. In many cases, not all of the pickups or deliveries are within the same metro areas. So after your vehicle is loaded onto the truck, the driver will likely perform more pickups and possibly some deliveries before your car arrives at its destination. So speeding up this process would mean reducing the cars hauled on that trip, thus reducing the number of stops the driver will need to make in between your pickup and delivery. So it may be very possible to make this happen. However, a couple of hundred dollars is probably not going to do it. More than likely you would need to pay as much as the driver will be losing by not hauling the other cars. So to make a substantial difference in the transit time, you may need to pay the equivalent of the cost to ship several vehicles.

Scheduling Time

Some auto shipping companies will provide an initial quote that is low to book the order. This will slow down the scheduling process, as carriers obviously do not want to take the cheapest orders first. However, at National Express our quotes are set with current market rates.

At National Express we do not offer an Expedited Shipping service. In our decades of experience, we have seen very few instances that adding more money to our quote would speed up the shipping times in any real way.