How hard is it to ship an exotic car across the country?

and he has this ramp that Evel Knievel wouldn't have gone up to try to get this Ferrari in there so anytime you're dealing with cars a frequent demand is to get them moved around the country and that means that you've got to deal with cars shippers and there's never an industry that I've seen that is so strange and incomprehensible as the guys that ship cars and it's the only industry where I've ever seen where the people that do it professionally become worse at it over time it seemed like it when I was selling cars I could only use a transporter for about six months before they would make such a preposterous mistake that I could simply never bear to speak to them again and I didn't understand it until I started to look at the economics of it because the obvious response to most people is to say well if none of these guys are good at it why don't you just get your own rig and hire your own driver and have them move all the cars because certainly the demand is sufficient I mean we were shipping cars almost every day at motorcars of Georgia but the problem is when you look at the rates that you're being charged because to do it all yourself and to have insurance and do it the proper way and have a qualified driver you're gonna spend about a dollar fifty to two dollars a mile but if you look at the rates that you actually get charged it's 50 to 80 cents a mile and so there's no way to really make a good business out of it and that's what people come to find so they start in it and they charge you you know what they see is being the average or what they could do in terms of market research but then they start to find out that well if I'm gonna do all this stuff I can't make money so I've got to start cutting corners and going too fast and not taking my time and not being careful and that's when bad things happen at the dealership we had access to these load boards and these professional services that we could essentially use to very specifically request a car be moved from point A to point B at a certain time but most shipping companies don't want you to do that because they don't want to be held to that tight of schedule so as a consumer or as someone like I was with the rental company without access to all that if you needed a car at a specific place at a specific time that was a very difficult thing to achieve so what I would have to do is find a friend that was a dealer or something that could get me on to something like Central Dispatch but I had a customer who was an Internet guy but he came to the US a few weeks a year and he wanted to essentially have on-demand access to a Ferrari wherever he was in the country and as a rental company I kind of had the ability to do that so he essentially paid me year-round for access to a specific car and he wanted it in Dallas for this conference he was going to and he told me exactly when he wanted it delivered and I had plenty of lead time this seemed like a doable thing and so I found a guy who said yes I can do that I'll pick it up here on this date and then I'll get it there and I had to be out of town the day that it was coming to be picked up and so I left it with someone who I trusted so I came to find out a couple days later that they did come to get the car but they had barely any idea how to make it move they didn't understand how the immobilizer worked and they had ended up you know finally being able to get it on the trucks all right well great it'll at least be headed in that direction but I found out a couple days after that that the truck had broken down and it was somewhere in Mississippi but the hydraulics for the lift gate on the back that was used to load low ground clearance cars had broken so my Ferrari is literally locked in this box and this guy that's expecting delivery at a very specific time at a very high price was not gonna get his car so I'm scrambling trying to figure out can we hook another truck up to it and get it out that way can I fly out there and drive it to him what can be done and the answer is nothing in most cases when things start to go off the rails they're useless to find any reasonable solution and they just expect you to wait on them and you really don't have any options in most of those cases but at the dealership I would constantly have issues these guys want their cars quickly they don't want to come and pick them up I mean we have to ship cars it's an unavoidable thing and we can't make them pay what it should cost us to achieve that outcome from someone we know will do a perfect job they want to pay 1,500 bucks to get a car from Atlanta to LA and that can be done and you know it probably has a fifty to sixty percent success rate of happening without any other incident and we'll tell them that but you can't talk them out of it and so we'll have them sign that you know this person is taking deliver on your behalf and we would always be very transparent about how the process works but that never stopped the weirdest things from happening and just because someone knows how to load a car they've driven you know 25 different of this particular car doesn't mean they really know how to treat it and making it move and get truck is not the same as understanding what it takes to achieve longevity of consumable parts particularly clutches then I remember we had a guy pick up an O seven 911 turbo and he's taken up this super steep ramp and I see him start to lurch and go back and forth and here the car just revving and revving and obviously eventually I started to see it just bellowing smoke but by the time I was out there he had already completely cooked the clutch so we had to call the customer and explain that we're gonna have to get this trucking company to try to pay for a clutch which obviously they're gonna make us sue him over and it was just an unending nightmare we had another guy come to pick up a Ferrari f430 it was an f1 car and he thought he could just drive it like an automatic but he comes back about ten minutes later and says the car won't go into gear and I said well I want you put the car into gear and drive it which didn't happen in neutral so what you're saying is that since you've had the car it won't go into here so well I guess so so you go out there and he has this ramp that Evel Knievel wouldn't have gone up to try to get this Ferrari in there and he's cooked the clutch so we've got to push the car back in and schedule a new clutch install and try to collect money from this guy but I remember back early in 2011 there was this orange lp640 it was a no seven it was one I had tried to buy but for a variety of reasons I didn't and I was kind of heartbroken to see it leave but we had sold it to this dealer in Texas and he kept sending these cheap useless truckers to come and pick the car up the first guy that showed up had just a three car wedge trailer and he had like an Econoline van and some old car and he was trying to put this Lamborghini on there and we looked at it and I pulled the car up next to it and signed the Bill of Lading that it was no longer my responsibility and I told him I said that car is not gonna go up that ramp he said oh yeah I do it all the time listen okay so he gets a running start and just gouges the carbon-fiber bumper onto the ramp and cracks both sides of it never said I told you he's like oh man it's all right I'll get it fixed once I get there he says you know what I think I can get it on backwards and I said you do understand that angles work in the same size in both directions just no no it'll work going backwards so he turns it around and backs up and drags the front bumper almost off the car in his attempt to get it back on so finally he concedes that all right I can't load this and I've videoed all this stuff because I see the carnage that's about to unfold and I send that to the person who's bought the car so a couple days later we get another guy show up and he doesn't even speak English but he's got a 10 car open hauler and he says he's here to pick up a car and he shows us the VIN and I recognize that it's that marciella go so I pull it around and show him the car and we walk around and he said no no no I I can't take this car and so he just left he said I'm not gonna try it I know I can't get it on there so that was the release to responsible decision but it set this guy back and so a few days later another guy shows up with a similarly useless trailer but at least this guy had enough wood to get it on there so the third time was a charm and he got it shipped off but the car was I mean at least had $10,000 worth of damage if not $25,000 worth of damage by the time it left so I had sold a barely used two vented or two Lamborghini Miami and they had used central dispatch or something like that to send a truck up here and I called him and I knew they needed the car quickly but I wasn't wildly impressed with the person they had sent he actually showed up in a box truck and he was gonna pick up this four hundred thousand dollar Aventador and I called their sales manager and I said hey man this is the guy that's here do you want me to let him have the car I don't think he can get it in there he said I've got to have the car tomorrow he said I'll do it it's it's on him he's got insurance and I asked him I said what is your insurance limit and they always say a million dollars but they have a million dollars in liability coverage they usually only have a hundred thousand or maybe 250,000 in cargo limit so there was no way this guy could afford to total this car with his insurance but again I asked us that are you sure you want me to hand in these keys and he said yes let him have it and I watch him get on that ramp stick his head out the driver's window and drive the thing up and of course he Rams it into the other side of the truck with the side he can't see cracks the bumper cracks the headlight and damages the front fender and he's like oh man oh man don't tell them I'm like they're a ten hour drive from here what on earth were you going to do to keep them from seeing this damaged car he's like I've got a guy between here and there he's gonna fix it I said ok ok so he proceeds to load it back up and I call Bobby the guy immediately and send him some pictures and saying this is what just happened to your car oh man alright well we'll get it fixed when he gets down here but when he called the guy already was denying that there was any damage to the car and so he had to demand that the car be there on time so he wouldn't have any chance to go and find someone to in adequately repair it I mean we used to have guys call us that had just had their cars shipped and they would be looking through and it really excited about their brand new Lamborghini and they'd opened the glove box and there'd be a valet ticket from a strip club where a transporter had gotten the car out driven it to a strip club at night and had a good time and then gotten back in and loaded it back in the truck so I had to have the worst heart-to-heart conversations with a whole lot of truckers explaining to them why we would never be using them again because the outcomes that they had were just simply unacceptable and the process of finding them is similarly miserable at one point in fact I had to modify the way that I would post cars as being available for pickup I eventually had to say call edy once at my phone number because otherwise they would call all the time at at one point it wasn't long after the record I think I was doing a radio interview and I literally got five missed calls in the course of three minutes from this guy and it kept beeping in and interrupting this interview and I finally had to say excuse me just a moment I'm gonna get this guy off the line and I switched over and I literally just said if you call me one more time I will find you and I will kill you and then I switched over and I finished the interview oh well but a few minutes later my boss walked over my desk he said Edie did you just threaten to kill a truck driver and I said well I mean I wasn't serious but that could have happened they said well the cops just called and apparently he was really concerned that you were going to find him and kill him so he called our local police who fortunately were good friends of the dealership and they said did that just threaten the killer truck driver and he had to say well that's not the least believable thing I've heard today and so I explained all right I'm not going to I apologized to the guy and explained he was in no danger but he also should not call me anymore and I found someone else to transport the car my goal would be for everybody to go pick up their car in person and road trip home it's the best thing you could ever do but most people aren't looking to do that so it's not going to be a problem that we get solved soon are you looking to buy your dream car premiere financial services offers the flexibility of financing with the tax benefits of leasing the PFS simple lease offers quick approvals and easy termination when you are ready for the next car visit our website and follow us for more

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,161,317

Rating: 4.9023523 out of 5

Keywords: Ed Bolian, VINwiki, Car Stories, Car Shipping, Lamborghini, McLaren, Ferrari, Atlanta, Transportation, Transport, Ship, Truck Driver, Central Dispatch, Box Truck, Liability, Insurance, Damage, Accident, Crash, Fail, Exotic Cars, Car Buying, Car Dealers, Exotic Car Dealers, Stupidity, Trailer, Liftgate, Breakdown, Broker, Lamborghini Atlanta, Lamborghini Miami, Aventador, 360 Modena, Car Hauler, Verde Ithaca, Arancio Argos, Car Story

Id: -inPRBhonfY

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018