The Challenges of Vehicle Transport in Today’s Market

The Challenges of Vehicle Transport in Today’s Market 
Auto dealers’ primary focus is to sell more cars. But many dealers currently oversee their own vehicle transports, often running into obstacles that force them away from their main objective. 

Fortunately, by outsourcing logistics to a single, trusted provider, dealers can reduce costs, increase speed to consumer, mitigate risks, increase visibility and bolster overall productivity. 

A New Vehicle-Sales Reality 
Consumers demand fast, easy and transparent buying experiences, and this certainly applies to buying vehicles. Now more than ever, amid the unprecedented effects of COVID-19 and shelter-in-place mandates, customers are going online to research and purchase their next vehicle. 

As a result, dealers are stepping up to the plate and being forced to innovate to meet this growing consumer demand, as well as the changing selling environment. The goal is to maximize potential markets, sell more vehicles, better meet customers’ expectations and keep both customers and employees safe. 

In a similar way, as auto e-commerce has emerged as the new reality, consumers know they are no longer confined to their local dealerships. They can purchase a vehicle from anywhere – which expands dealers’ overall sales potential and increases the number of auto transports they need. 

All this has led to dealers spending more time on coordinating logistics and ensuring vehicles arrive at their correct destinations – whether from an auction to a dealership, dealership to dealership or a dealership to a customer’s home. And while these dealers are certainly committed to customer satisfaction and the fast, efficient and secure transport of their vehicles, they often run into logistical obstacles while coordinating such deliveries. Challenges can include juggling multiple transportation providers, trying to keep up with tracking in-transit inventory and handling any last-minute reroutes that occur as business shifts or changes.  

All these demands require time and effort, meaning dealers spend more time on transport logistics and less time on selling cars and working with customers. 

A Single Vehicle-Logistics Solution 
Unforeseen inefficiencies often pop up as dealers vet carriers, plan logistics and orchestrate their vehicles’ transports. 

Therefore, many dealers are turning to a single vehicle-logistics provider for all auto-transport needs. In turning to one outsourced auto transport partner, they can achieve the following benefits: 

1. Reduced costs: A single outsourced provider has the freedom to negotiate competitive rates, so it can commit to delivering quality performance and competitive rates. If that provider also reports all transportation activity through a single transportation management platform then, such as ACERTUS’ VINlocity platform, dealers have an additional opportunity to analyze costs and remove inefficiencies, resulting in significant transportation spend savings. 
2. Speed to market: A single, logistics provider can tap into a large network of carriers like ACERTUS’, which has wide coverage and varying amounts of capacity, ensuring a faster delivery, no matter where the vehicle is headed. Delays due to lack of capacity are essentially eliminated. 
3. Reduced risks: A vehicle-transport provider with an emphasis on quality and safety can remove unnecessary risks by ensuring its drivers are well-versed and experienced in vehicle-delivery protocol. ACERTUS also has comprehensive liability insurance and contingent cargo coverage in place, which lead to an overall lower risk for claims and a higher-generated profit. 
4. Improved visibility: Real-time visibility allows dealers to better anticipate and prepare for vehicles’ arrival, so they can line up detailing, maintenance, car washing and more, ensuring their incoming vehicles are quickly made road-ready and reducing any downtime. ACERTUS has one integrated and easy-to-use transportation-management system, giving dealers wide visibility and robust analytics, as well as the ability to make transport changes as needed. 
5. Increased productivity: All these elements add up to deliver increased productivity to the dealer. With a single sourced provider like ACERTUS focused on transporting vehicles, and with the dealer’s active role in the process streamlined through one simple platform, that dealer can prioritize selling its vehicles and working with customers. 

Beyond streamlining the vehicle-transport process and simplifying the dealer’s priority list, an outsourced provider like ACERTUS can also provide care and maintenance, storage, title and registration and vehicle home-delivery – meaning vehicles can arrive to a dealership or customer’s home 100-percent ready to hit the road. 

Where to Go from Here  
There are quite a few dealer advantages that come from outsourcing vehicle transportation to a single provider. Learn more about these many advantages by downloading our free white paper here. 

ACERTUS is committed to helping dealers realizing these benefits to their business through its wide carrier network and simplified vehicle-transport process. To find out more about ACERTUS’ unique vehicle-logistics solutions, visit ACERTUSdelivers.com.