Getting the car home

Local pickup is best when it exists, but the real advice is the inverse. Do not let geography narrow your search. People talk themselves into a worse car two hours away instead of the right car three states away. A 911 is a car you keep for years, and a few thousand dollars in enclosed transport is a rounding error against buying the wrong one.

Fly and drive versus shipping turns on four things. Distance, the car's condition and value, the season, and how well you know the car after the PPI.

Fly and drive

The case for

You get a several hundred mile shakedown that no inspection replicates. Heat soak, highway vibration, a gearbox worked properly, whether the A/C quits after two hours. Problems that hide during a twenty minute test drive surface by hour four. It is often cheaper than enclosed transport. And it is the trip you will remember.

What argues against driving

• Condition. A sorted 991 with records is a fine thousand mile drive. A thirty year old air cooled car with unknown history that has been sitting is not. Neither is anything with a cooling system you do not trust.
• Mileage matters on some cars. Two thousand miles on a low mile 993 or a GT car is real money off the value. On a 120k mile 996 it is noise.
• Season. Salt belt routes, mountain passes, and summer tires are a bad combination.
• Tires and brakes. Tires at 5/32, date code 2017, means fine for local errands and wrong for a cross country run. Replace them before you leave, or ship it.

Before you drive it home

Insurance bound before you leave. Title in hand, or a lien payoff process you actually understand. Temp tag or transit permit sorted for your state. Bill of sale. Pack a tire gauge, a code reader, a jump pack, and a quart of the correct oil. Route it in daylight with realistic days. Do not do 700 miles the day you take delivery. And stop at fifty miles and look underneath. That is your real inspection.

Shipping

Broker vs carrier

Most shipping companies are not trucking companies. They are brokers. You pay a broker, the broker posts your car to a load board, and whichever carrier bids takes it. You may not know who is physically handling your $90,000 car until a truck shows up in your driveway.

Brokers are not inherently bad. Good ones have carriers they use repeatedly and will not post to the open board. But you have to ask, and almost nobody does.

Questions to ask before you pay anyone

• Are you a broker or a carrier? If they dodge this, that is the answer.
• If broker, will this go on a load board, or do you have a specific carrier? Who?
• What is the carrier's MC and DOT number? Verify it yourself at the FMCSA SAFER site. It takes two minutes and shows authority status, inspection history, and insurance.
• Can I see the cargo insurance certificate, and what is the coverage per vehicle? This is the one that bites people. A carrier may hold $250,000 total cargo coverage for a truck carrying eight cars. If yours is worth $120,000, you are not covered. Ask explicitly, in writing.
• Does my own policy cover the car in transit? Often it does not, and agreed value collector policies handle this differently than standard carriers.

Open vs enclosed

Open is fine for a driver quality 997 in July. It is the wrong call for anything you care about, anything freshly painted, anything low, and anything crossing a northern winter. Enclosed runs roughly 40 to 60% more.

If you go enclosed, hard side over soft side, and a liftgate rather than ramps for anything lowered, aero equipped, or a GT car. A ramp load on a low front lip is how splitters die. If you go open, ask for top load so nothing above you leaks onto your car.

Price, payment, and timing

A quote well below every other quote is bait. The broker takes your deposit, posts the load at a rate no carrier will accept, and it sits for two weeks until they call asking for more. Get three quotes and be suspicious of the low one, not the high one.

Normal structure is a deposit to the broker and the balance to the driver at delivery, often cash or certified funds. Full payment demanded upfront is a flag.

Delivery windows are estimates, not appointments. Snowbird season, southbound in October and November and northbound in April and May, spikes both price and delay.

References

The carrier review ecosystem is heavily gamed. Better sources are the generation forum, the shop that did your PPI since they load cars onto transporters every week and know who is careful, and the selling dealer who they actually use. The established enclosed names cost more and are the ones people bring up unprompted.

Need an inspector first? Find an independent PPI shop near the car before you book any transport.

Field notes

These are real trips, not theory. The numbers that look small on a spreadsheet can eat the whole deal if the car is not what you expected.

The easy trip was not the cheap trip

I bought an E46 M3 from Blue Grass Motorsports in Louisville. The dealership was great, even let me ship an Amazon box of supplies ahead so I would have what I needed for the drive. I picked the car up in Atlanta and drove it back to Los Angeles. On a 23,000 mile car I was worried about rock chips on the interstate, so I had the front end covered in PPF before I left. The shop laughed and said they had never seen a 2004 with paint protection applied. The drive was fine, and the PPF paid for itself in peace of mind.

I stored the car at Auto Palace in Los Angeles until I had a more permanent solution. That monthly bill added up fast. Transport, PPF, and short term storage turned a clean purchase into a much more expensive project than the listing price suggested.

The cheap car was the most expensive one

The other option I considered was a street legal track car in Dallas. I paid someone to fly out and inspect it. They were dropped off by an Uber that waited five or ten minutes while they made the deal. Negotiation power was basically gone. The seller was far outside the city, the inspector had a plane to catch, and the car was put into open air storage until I could get to it.

When I finally went to pick it up, the car was out of gas on the first test drive. That turned out to be a hole in the fuel tank. It was Friday afternoon, so I dropped it at the dealership. They had to order a new OEM tank from Germany. A month later I flew back to pick it up.

Driving it across Texas I got a flat. No spare. Euro low profile track tires are not what roadside assistance is set up for. It was Sunday, so nobody wanted to work. Eventually someone showed up with an out of date tire, mounted it, and I limped to LA. I replaced all four tires immediately. Later, up in Washington, a suspension issue showed up that was close to catastrophic. Custom work followed.

I owned that car for five years. I skipped the PPI. The first repair bill was more than the purchase price. Then I paid for storage for two years, moved it, and paid for storage for two more years. In the end I basically gave it away to get out of it.

What I would do differently

• Do the PPI. A pre purchase inspection would have caught the fuel tank, the suspension, and the tire setup before I owned the problem.
• Open air storage is not storage. It is neglect with a roof sometimes. If the car is far from home, budget real indoor storage or ship it to where you can watch it.
• Track tires and Sunday roadsides do not mix. If you are driving a car home on aggressive rubber, carry a spare plan, because AAA may not have one.
• Count the real cost. Purchase price plus transport plus PPF plus immediate consumables plus storage plus the first repair bill. That is the number that matters.