Shipping a classic car overseas: choosing a method and preparing the car

Most guidance on shipping a car is written by people who want to sell you the shipping, which is why almost all of it leads with a price. The price is the least useful thing to lead with, because it follows from decisions you have not made yet, and the decisions are where classics differ from ordinary cars.

Shipping a classic car overseas is not the same job as shipping a modern one. An old car is more fragile, harder to start, more likely to leak, more valuable to the wrong person, and far more likely to be carrying half a century of accumulated dirt under its floor. Every one of those facts affects how it should travel.

The three ways a car crosses an ocean

Roll-on roll-off, universally shortened to RoRo, is the ferry principle at ocean scale. The car is driven aboard by port staff, parked on a vehicle deck, chocked and strapped, and driven off at the other end. It is the cheapest method and the most routine.

What you accept in exchange is exposure. The car sits on a working deck in a marine atmosphere, handled by people who move hundreds of vehicles a day and who are not classic specialists. It has to travel empty. And it has to be driveable, which is the constraint that decides the method for many older cars.

A container is a sealed steel box. The car is loaded, strapped down at the wheels or chassis, and nobody opens the door until the destination. A full container to yourself is the most protective mainstream option and the most expensive. Sharing a container with other vehicles, which specialist shippers arrange routinely, sits between RoRo and a sole-use container on cost, and keeps most of the protection.

Air freight exists, is extraordinarily expensive, and is genuinely used for very valuable cars and for cars that need to be somewhere by a date. For most classics it is not a real option, though it is worth knowing it exists.

The choice is not really about money. It is about what the loss would mean. A tidy, insured, ordinary-value car on a well-travelled route is a sensible RoRo candidate. A concours restoration, a car whose value is substantially in its originality, or anything that cannot reliably drive onto a ship, belongs in a container.

What a non-runner forces

RoRo requires the car to be driven on and off under its own power. That means an engine that starts reliably in a queue on a cold morning, and it means brakes and steering that work, which is the part people forget. A car that starts but stops poorly is not a car a port will accept on a crowded deck.

Anything that fails that test goes in a container and is winched or pushed in. It costs more, and the extra cost is entirely predictable, so it belongs in the budget from the beginning. What causes trouble is optimism: describing a car as a runner because it ran last summer.

Preparing a classic for the sea

Some of this is ordinary shipping preparation. The parts that are specific to old cars are the ones that cause problems.

• Clean the underside properly. This is the single most overlooked step and the one most likely to cause a detention. Countries with serious biosecurity regimes inspect used vehicles inside and out on arrival, looking for soil, seeds, insects, plant material and animal material. A car that has lived on a farm track or sat in a damp barn needs steam cleaning underneath, in the wheel arches and inside the spare wheel well, before it is loaded.
• Fuel. Shippers set their own limits and will tell you what they want. On a classic the more useful question is what is already in the tank: stale petrol that has sat through a storage season is exactly what you do not want to be relying on to start the car at a port.
• Battery and alarms. The battery must be secure and, on most routes, connected so the car can be moved. An aftermarket alarm or immobiliser that nobody at the port understands is a genuine liability, so hand over clear instructions with the keys.
• Leaks. A car that marks the deck is a problem for the carrier. Fixing a chronic drip before shipping is cheaper than discussing it in a foreign port.
• Secure the loose things. Hood frames, tonneau covers, badges, spare wheels and anything that can vibrate free. On RoRo the car travels empty, so anything removable that is not fixed should not be in it at all.
• Photograph everything. Date-stamped photographs of every panel, the interior, the underside if you can, and the odometer, taken at handover. This is your evidence if a claim ever happens, and it is the cheapest insurance in the process.

The destination rules decide things before you ship

The mistake that costs the most is treating shipping as the first step. For several major destinations, the paperwork has to be finished before the car is loaded, not after.

Australia is the clearest example. An import approval must be held before the vehicle is shipped, and importing a road vehicle without one is an offence. Approval runs through the government’s online portal, the assessment period for a single vehicle is around thirty business days, and setting up an account with identity checks takes time on top of that. The relevant route for a classic is the concessional pathway for older vehicles, which needs a build date more than twenty-five years before the application date. Be careful with older advice here: the familiar pre-1989 rule belonged to the previous system and no longer applies.

Two Australian details deserve their own paragraph, because they surprise British sellers. Asbestos: the import prohibition applies to vehicles of any type, age or value, and the parts of an old car most likely to contain it are exactly the ones you would expect, being gaskets, brake pads and linings, seals and clutch components. A written declaration that a car is asbestos free is explicitly not accepted as evidence on its own. And the duty threshold is not the same as the approval threshold: the customs duty concession applies to vehicles thirty years and older, while the import pathway opens at twenty-five, so a twenty-seven-year-old car can be perfectly importable and still be charged duty. Goods and services tax applies regardless of age.

The United States turns entirely on the age of the car, and the rule runs from the build date rather than the model year. That is covered in detail in our guide to the 25-year rule, and it is worth reading before agreeing a shipping date rather than after.

For any destination, the general principle holds: find out what the receiving country requires, in what order, before you book anything.

Insurance for the voyage

An ordinary classic policy does not usually follow the car onto a ship. Transit cover is arranged separately, and it varies more than people expect.

The first question is scope. Total-loss-only cover does what it says: it responds if the vessel or the car is lost, and not to a dent. All-risks cover is broader and costs more. For an irreplaceable car, the difference between the two is the entire point of insuring it.

The second question, and the one that matters most for a classic, is what value is insured and who decides it. A car with an agreed value established before it sails is a claim; a car whose worth is argued about afterwards is a dispute. Documented evidence of value, which is the same evidence a specialist insurer wants for agreed value cover at home, is worth assembling before the car leaves.

Two things worth asking any shipper directly: what their liability actually is if the car is damaged in their care, which is usually far narrower than customers assume, and whether the quoted price includes transit insurance or merely mentions it.

Getting the price you are quoted

Quotes vary enormously, and much of the variation is real: route, method, season, vessel availability and how much of the door-to-door journey is included all move the number. Some of it is not real, and shows up as a headline figure that excludes collection, port charges at one or both ends, customs clearance, or insurance.

Ask for the total landed cost in writing, itemised, and check specifically whether it includes collection from your address, charges at the destination port, customs clearance and any inspection fees. Then compare like with like. A quote that looks dramatically cheaper than the others is usually answering a different question.

Getting the car there is the middle of the story. What happens at the far end, and what the car is worth once it arrives, is decided by rules that were set long before it was loaded.