Ask ten people in this industry what enclosed transport costs and you will hear the same folk answer: about double. Our own booking records say the real number is far friendlier, and the cars riding inside the box are not the ones most people picture. Ship A Car has dispatched both kinds of trailer on the same lanes for more than a decade, and this report distills those records, thousands of open and enclosed bookings side by side, into the numbers that actually decide whether the box is worth it for your car.
One Car in Seven Now Rides the Box
Enclosed used to be a specialty request. From 2019 through 2022, about one car in thirteen in our book shipped enclosed, a share so steady it looked like a law of nature. Then it broke: the enclosed share climbed through 2023 and has held at roughly one car in seven across 2025 and 2026, double the old baseline.
Nothing about the trailers changed; the cars did. Average transaction prices on new vehicles have pushed a bigger slice of the fleet into money-worth-protecting territory, and owners who pay for ceramic coating, paint protection film, or a wrap increasingly treat enclosed transport as the last mile of that same investment.
The Real Premium Is About a Third
To measure the premium honestly, we matched lanes: the same origin state to the same destination state, priced both ways in our recent bookings, dozens of lanes with enough of each trailer type to compare. The median result is that enclosed costs about a third more than open on the same lane, and on the middle half of lanes the premium runs between roughly 15 and 50 percent.
That spread is the useful part. The premium is not a fixed surcharge, it is a market: on deep corridors where enclosed rigs run every week the gap nearly closes, while on thin lanes an enclosed truck may have to be routed in specially and the premium widens toward half again the open rate. Where your lane falls is a question our coordinators can answer from the same records this report is built on.
What the folk answer gets wrong is the doubling. Lanes where enclosed genuinely costs twice the open rate exist in our book, but they are outliers at the tail, not the rule, and a shopper who walks away from a quote because they assumed double is usually pricing a myth.
There Is No Enclosed Season
Car shipping rates breathe with the calendar, a cycle we mapped in our price calendar, but the enclosed share does not: month by month it holds between about 10 and 15 percent of bookings all year, with no winter spike and no summer lull worth planning around.
The practical consequence is about equipment, not timing. For every enclosed booking in our records we run roughly six open ones, and the national fleet is built to match, so the scarce resource on any given week is the enclosed truck itself. Book the equipment early and let the calendar worry about the rate; a few extra days of lead time does more for an enclosed move than any month on the calendar.
What Actually Rides Inside
The surprise in the manifest is what the box does not carry: mostly new cars. The median vehicle is a 2018 model year on both sides of the fence, because enclosed is not about age, it is about specialness, and specialness lives at both ends of the age scale.
Cars built before 1990 make up about a fifth of our enclosed manifest, four times their share of the open one, and prestige and performance marques make up better than a quarter of it, thirteen times their share outside. The single most shipped enclosed car in our records is the Chevrolet Corvette, trailed by the Camaro, the Mustang and its Shelby variants, and the Porsche 911: America ships its muscle in the box.
Two footnotes from the manifest. About one brand-new vehicle in seven ships enclosed, dealers and collectors protecting delivery-mile cars, and the most common cargo of all in our enclosed trailers is not a car: it is a golf cart, which rides enclosed almost by default and is counted separately from every figure in this report.
How to Decide
The clean rule from the data: price the risk, not the pride. A car whose paint, originality, or replacement cost would make a stone chip a real financial event, a fresh restoration, a wrapped or matte finish, a collector car with numbers-matching panels, earns that premium easily, and that is exactly the traffic already riding enclosed in our book.
Mechanical constraints decide the rest: anything with a few inches of ground clearance wants the liftgate that comes with enclosed equipment, and soft-top classics that can no longer trust their weather seals should not spend three days on an interstate in the open.
For a daily driver, the honest answer has not changed: open transport is how nearly nine of every ten cars travel, including most of the new inventory on its way to the dealership you bought yours from, and the wrap on those factory loads is doing the same job a windshield does on yours. Spend the premium where the car has earned it; our classic car team will tell you straight when it has not.
Methodology
This report aggregates Ship A Car, Inc. open and enclosed vehicle bookings from 2019 through August 2026. The share trend counts passenger vehicles only, with golf carts, motorcycles, trailers, and powersports excluded so that mix changes in those categories cannot masquerade as a trend; the premium compares median booked tariffs for open and enclosed shipments on matched origin-to-destination state pairs from 2023 onward, using only pairs with at least two bookings of each trailer type, and reports the median of those lane-level premiums. Monthly shares use booking dates, fleet observations use vehicle descriptions as booked, the first and final years in the window are partial, no absolute volumes appear in this report, and all figures are aggregates with no customer information included.
Common Questions
How much more does enclosed car shipping really cost? On the same lane, the median premium in our bookings is about a third, with most lanes falling between 15 and 50 percent more than open. Double the open rate happens only on outlier lanes, and a real quote takes one call to beat the guesswork.
Is enclosed transport worth it for a daily driver? Usually not, and we say so. Open transport carries about six of every seven cars we ship, the same way nearly all new inventory reaches dealerships, and the premium buys little for a car that lives outdoors anyway.
Do brand-new cars need enclosed shipping? Most do not: factory loads travel open under protective wrap every day. About one in seven of the brand-new vehicles in our book goes enclosed, typically delivery-mile collector orders and high-end dealer trades where the first owner wants zero road exposure.
Is there a cheaper season for enclosed transport? There is a cheaper season for car shipping in general, but no enclosed season: the enclosed share of our bookings holds near steady every month of the year. Lead time matters more than the month, because the enclosed fleet is a fraction of the size of the open one.
Get a Quote
Call Ship A Car, Inc. at (866) 821-4555 with your two zip codes and what you drive, and a coordinator who dispatches both kinds of trailer every week will price open and enclosed side by side in one conversation, or start with the instant calculator.
