When you start thinking about shipping your exotic, classic, or rare automobile, you’ll probably come to the realization fairly quickly that there really are a ton of details involved with a project like that. If you’re fortunate and hook up with a very good transport company, they will handle practically all those details for you, so you don’t become a nervous wreck about the whole thing.

The only thing left for you to consider will be the exotic auto transport price itself, and if you want to get at least a vague notion of the components that make up the overall price, you can start contacting carriers with your queries. Before you even get into that though, you may want to have some idea ahead of time about what’s involved in calculating the cost of shipping your exotic automobile.

Many of those cost factors are shown below, and while others could possibly be included, not all will apply either. Every shipment of an exotic automobile is pretty much a custom shipment, because every exotic car is special in its own way and requires some kind of special handling. That being said, here is a checklist of things that could conceivably be applicable to your own vehicle transport.

• Distance

If your car is being shipped across the country, that will require more time, more fuel, and more shipping expense than if it were a shipment between two nearby cities.

• Shipment method

You are probably going to want to have your exotic auto shipped in an enclosed carrier, so as to eliminate the possibility of any external objects touching it during shipping. While an open carrier is completely safe 99.9% of the time too, the enclosed carrier removes the .01% chance of accidents.

• Pickup method

If you drive your car to a convenient pickup point where your shipper can load it, that’s less expensive than if the pickup method is door-to-door, where the transport vehicle has to come directly to your home, or as near as street limitations allow

• Insurance

This is strongly recommended, because you already have a considerable investment in your exotic auto, and you just don’t want to risk losing it without compensation if some kind of disaster were to occur

• Season

This could be a factor for you, depending on what time of year you need to transport your vehicle. Sometimes during winter months, fewer shipments are scheduled, so each one becomes a bit more expensive.

• Size of your vehicle

Size matters because of the space your vehicle occupies on the transport – for instance, larger vehicles might require two shipping spaces during transport.

• Time constraints

If you need to ship your vehicle on short notice, this is more difficult to arrange, because it means allocating a driver and transport carrier that was not already scheduled to be in your area. Such short-notice shipments can still usually be accommodated, but there will generally be an added cost.

As mentioned earlier, not all of these factors will apply to any given shipment, but then again you may have some special considerations that would necessitate additional costs too. If you need to attach a dollar figure to some kind of estimate, you can use the following rule of thumb to come up with a ballpark figure, and then consult with carriers to get more exact.

On a generic website for calculating auto transport costs, there will be a cost estimator for auto shipments. If you enter in all the relevant information about distance, car size, etc and get an approximate figure, you can then multiply that number by 1.5 or 2 to calculate the cost of the same shipment for an exotic vehicle.