Classic car delivery

Getting my new car home was an interesting experience.  The Daimler was bought in Ramsgate and I live in Lincolnshire, about 6 hours away at a steady pace.  My wife's mother was very poorly and this fact, taken with I did not want to drive that far in a car that had done very few miles over the last few years helped me decide that I was going to have the car brought back on the back of a lorry.

I assumed that finding a company to deliver it home would be easy.  So I spent some time on the internet looking for suitable companies.  There is no equivalent of tripadviser.  My experience was interesting, I phoned one chap and asked for a quote.  He gave me a price that seemed reasonable.  I phoned a few others who were quite a bit more.  So I rang him back to accept his quote, at which point he informed me his original figure had been an estimate.  He asked me to e-mail him the details over and he would give me a price.  Nothing happened, so I chased him, nothing.  Eventually after ringing him again his quote went up by £90.  So back to the drawing board.

Then I found a couple of sites where they get quotes for you, a little like a reverse auction.  I suspect that it is not quite as open a competition as they would like you to believe.  I had 5 quotes sent over within a few hours, all within about £10 of each other, some were a couple of £s apart.

I then found another chap via the internet, agreed 2 different dates to make it easy for him.  And I made the mistake of paying upfront as I wanted the car dropping off and the keys popping through the door as I would be at work and my wife was visiting at the hospital every day.

So come the day of the collection it was finally collected around 4pm.  I was informed when I rang that it would be delivered the following day - not a problem.  The following day came and went, so I rang about 8pm to be told that the car would either delivered over the weekend or the following week.  I explained politely but firmly that I expected to see the car the following day.

The car did finally arrive, 2 days later than agreed.  Over the last 2 days whilst it was being delivered I had a number of approaches from some of the other companies who offered to reduce their quotes considerably.

So the lessons are; choosing a company to transport your car is a complete lottery, do not be suprised if it is delivered late and a price is not always a quote. 

Next time I will describe my first drive.