Classic, Luxury & Supercar Transport

The most expensive thing you can do to a car that has been standing all winter is drive it two hundred miles. Cold starts, a fuel system that has not been asked to do anything in months, brakes that have sat, tyres with a flat spot on them — a long run is exactly the wrong first outing after a lay-up. Putting the car on a flatbed skips all of it. The engine never turns, the clutch never takes up, and the car arrives in the condition it left in.

It also leaves the odometer where it was. On a car whose value is partly its mileage and partly its history, a few hundred miles added for the sake of moving it between two addresses is money off the car for nothing. Classic car transport on a truck is the cheaper option once you count what the drive itself costs you.

On the bed the car is strapped over the wheels rather than pulled down on the chassis, so nothing is loaded through the suspension or the body. It sits above the road surface for the whole journey, and it comes off the same way it went on — winched slowly, with someone watching it, not driven off in a hurry.

The number that decides everything is the approach angle — the slope the car has to climb to get onto the bed.

A tilt-and-slide is good precisely because it drops to a shallower angle than a fixed ramp, but shallow is not the same as flat. Splitters, deep front lips, side skirts and lowered springs all eat into the margin, and the point where a splitter touches is the point where this stops being a transport job and becomes a bodywork job.

The fix is boring and effective: planks under the wheels to lift the car, a slow approach, and someone watching the front end the whole way up. On a car with adjustable or air suspension, get it into its highest setting before we arrive and tell us that's where it is.

If you know your car scrapes on ordinary driveways, mention it when you book. That one sentence changes how we set up.

A good deal of what we move in this category doesn't start, and some of it hasn't started in decades.

Barn finds and restoration projects are routine. No brakes, no keys, a seized engine, flat and perished tyres, a car that hasn't rolled since the eighties — all normal. What matters is whether the wheels turn, because a car that rolls goes up on the winch and one that doesn't goes on skates.

Cars with the wheels off, or largely in pieces on pallets, are also movable, but they need a real conversation rather than a booking form. Tell us what state it's genuinely in. Nobody has ever regretted being too honest about a project car on the phone.

Four things make a valuable car's move go smoothly.

Photograph it before we arrive — all four corners, and anything already marked. We do the same at both ends, and matching sets mean any question afterwards is settled rather than argued.

Tell us about the alarm and the immobiliser, and whether there's a tracker that will object to the car moving on a truck. Leave the fuel low but not empty: enough to move under its own power at either end, not a full tank of dead weight.

And make sure whoever hands the car over actually knows it. 'It's in the garage, the key's under the mat' is fine for a runabout. For something valuable, it's worth a person being there.