Vehicle Shipping Containers For Safer Car Shipping

When shipping your vehicle overseas, your car shipping company may recommend that you make use of a vehicle shipping container. Through this method, the car shipper places your car inside a steel vehicle shipping container for 100% safety and protection. These huge and stackable 20 feet or 40 feet containers can take in several items such as household items, crates, boxes, pieces of furniture, appliances, cars, trucks, and even boats.

Shipping your car inside a container is much safer than RORO shipping. Your car is strapped safely inside the container, perfectly tucked away from potential harm. Shippers secure the car inside the container with floor rings by ratchet straps. The wheels are securely locked into position by wooden chocks. This is international closed car shipping, and it has its advantages over the open RO-RO shipping, although more expensive.

When using the vehicle shipping container, your shipping company will allow you to place a few personal items inside your car. You do not need to remove your spare tire, tools (but not worth more than $200 in all) car jack, tire chain, fire extinguisher, tire inflator, first aid kit, jumper cable, warning triangle or emergency lights. However, the shipping company could ask that you remove your car TV set, removable accessories such as a bicycle rack or ski rack, flammable substance, and radios for practical reasons. For your own good, you might also want to remove important documents inside your car and turn off the alarm system.

For really expensive cars, a number of car shipping companies have containers with climate control feature. Some even place a special cloth over the car for extra protection even when it is already safely inside a locked container freight. Owners of very expensive and rare cars, such as a Hummer, Ferrari or Bugatti decide to ship their cars overseas inside a container. Enclosed car shipping gives them better peace of mind, since their expensive automobiles will be off their sight for a few days or weeks.

If you wish to save money and decide not to ship your car using a freight container, ask for the RORO shipping service. RORO stands for Roll-On Roll-Off, because your car will not be hauled inside a shipping container but rolled on the deck of a ship, and then rolled off upon reaching the destination. Cars are driven inside the ship and strapped on the vessel to make sure it doesn’t move around during the transit. It is a very simple process, since no packing is required, but effective.

Overseas car shipping through a RORO vessel is the cheapest way of doing it. It is not such a bad thing, for sure, since most car manufacturers as Honda and Ford prefer this method. This means it is quite safe. A RORO vessel is built primarily for the purpose of transporting cars, trucks, buses and other heavy equipments. Non-motorized items for shipping usually include boats on trailers, non-moving vehicles, and machineries. Cargos including automobiles are stacked safely under deck. They are secured inside the hold, which is wind and water tight.