Trends Now Affecting Auto Transport Industry

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As technology evolves and the economy constantly fluctuates, so does the auto transport industry. When car shipping changes as the result of things economy or technology, shipping rates get directly impacted.

If you plan on shipping a car, understanding these trends and changes can help you better understand and predict possible future rate changes.

Capacity Crunch – Capacity crunch is an auto industry freight term referencing to diminishing capacity for shipping. Realistically, this is being caused because there is a lack of people entering the freight industry. So, when people retire or leave the industry and don’t get replaced right away, the overall ability to ship something decreases slightly.

This is occurring now, and the auto shipping industry is not immune from it or its effects. It is likely this is caused by an extremely low unemployment rate and a general decreased interest in the freight industry.

Capacity crunch is far from being at a critical level. In fact, automated technology could soon help alleviate some of the capacity crunch. Increased levels of driverless tech could soon become part of the freight industry.

This is one of many reasons auto transport brokers are important. They facilitate and coordinate car shipments between customers and hundreds of car carrier networks. If the number of carriers decreases, it helps keep prices lower. And it takes a lot of the work out of finding a carrier that can make your shipment in a timely fashion.

Electronic Logging Devices Mandate – This government regulation has been grandfathered into the freight industry and at full scale in 2019. It requires all motor carriers in the freight industry to have devices installed that automatically track a drivers’ hours driven/worked. This is in an effort to prevent drivers from driving too much which increases the potential for an accident.

This has the potential to cause a slight increase in price as well as the duration of your car shipment. If drivers can’t drive an extra hour or two, each day (which they routinely used to do) it will take longer to complete the trip which then increases the cost.

Environmental Initiatives – For the past few years, there has been a big push to ensure harmful emissions caused by transportation is kept to a minimum. Its effort is to help improve and lower the level of pollution in the environment.

More clean-running and low-emission trucks in the freight and car shipping industries are a direct result.

Making the change to these kinds of vehicles will likely now slightly increase the prices of freight and auto shipping. However, it will help lower prices sinced these trucks run considerably more efficient.

Freight Technology Disruptors – A technology disruptor is a new tech innovation in a particular market that disrupts existing ways of doing business. In the freight industry over the past couple of years, tracking apps has bcome more popular. These apps have started to change the ability a customer has to track their shipment.

With increased customer satisfaction and the resulting increase in the volume of business being done, expect lower freight and auto transport industry prices.

There isn’t much you can do about these changing industry trends. Just realize these industry changes and resulting mild price fluctuations will continue to occur. If you look to ship a car one month and get a quote, then using the exact same specifications, get a quote to ship your car the next month, the price could be higher or lower depending on  current industry trends.