Should you drive or ship your car when moving? The short answer: drive if the move is a few hundred miles, ship if it is a serious distance. Once the route crosses about 500 miles, the full cost of driving (fuel, hotels, meals, wear, and days of your time) lands close to a transport quote, and the car arrives without any of the miles. Here is the honest comparison for a family weighing both.
You’re picking up stakes and moving. Far away, as in across the country or from one region to another. You’re packing up the house and hiring a moving company for the household goods, and as for the car? “This would be a great time to see the country,” you think. “The family could pile into the ol’ SUV and make some memories.”
HOLD. UP.
Let’s take a close look at driving the car yourself vs. shipping it.
Driving it yourself.
- The family spends days squeezed into one car (or two, caravanning both vehicles), sleeping in hotels, eating on the road, with all the explosive family exchanges that come from that much proximity and no escape hatch until the next motel.
- If you’re driving by yourself, you’ll have no one to take over the wheel when you’re tired. Eight-plus hours behind a wheel can take a toll.
- You definitely will see parts of the country you’ve never seen, especially on the side roads, which add time to the trip.
- You incur the cost of food on the road and hotel rooms. Friends and family along the route can save money, if your route happens to have them.
- Do you have enough time? Most moves happen on a job or school clock. Will you arrive in time, or spend the trip rushing past the sights you drove to see?
- You will incur extra wear and tear on your car, hundreds or thousands of miles of it.
- One real advantage: precious keepsakes (photo albums, sensitive papers) can travel with you in the car, under your own eye the whole way.
Shipping the car.
- The transport company picks the car up at your address and delivers it to your new home door to door; where a big rig genuinely cannot reach, you meet the driver at a wide spot nearby.
- You can’t pack household goods in the car; carriers are not licensed or insured for them.
- Depending on budget, the car rides an “open carrier” (exposed to the elements, the value standard) or an “enclosed carrier” for full protection at roughly a third more.
- Transport companies work around your schedule, with pickup windows planned so the car lands at the new home in a time frame that works.
- Shipping lets the family fly to the new home and arrive rested, in plenty of time for work and school deadlines.
- Mileage and wear on your car is essentially zero.
- You may need a rental car for a few days at the new home before your vehicle arrives, which belongs in the comparison honestly.
So, what’s the answer? It depends on YOUR needs/desires/budget.
Distance decides most cases: a few hundred miles, drive it; cross-country, the math flips. Run the numbers for a coast-to-coast move:
As a general 2026 estimate, shipping a mid-size sedan across the country by open carrier runs about $2,200 to $2,800. AAA’s driving-cost research puts the full cost of operating a car (fuel, maintenance, wear, insurance) at roughly 80 cents per mile in recent years, so a 2,700 mile drive like Philadelphia to San Diego costs around $2,160 in operating cost alone, before a single hotel night, road meal, or vacation day is counted.
Add three or four nights of hotels and a week of meals, and driving usually costs more than shipping while delivering a tired family and a car with 2,700 new miles.
Shipping’s honest extras are the airline tickets and a few days of rental car, which the hotel-and-meals savings largely offset.
Naturally, our answer is ship the car! Once it leaves the old driveway, it is one less thing to manage in a week full of things to manage. We’ve provided door-to-door transport for more than 50,000 vehicles nationwide, with an A+ rating from the BBB and consistent 5-star customer reviews.
Call us at 866-821-4555 now to speak with one of our expert shipping agents, or price your move in seconds with the instant calculator.
