Shipping a Car That’s Not Working

Jeremy Louisos, Senior Vice President at Preowned Auto Logistics, explains how they use winches or other equipment to load and ship in-operable vehicles from private residences, terminals, or places like Copart auctions.

I’m Jeremy Louisos, Senior Vice President at Preowned Auto Logistics and I want to talk to you about shipping a vehicle that’s not working. In our industry, we call that an in-op, which stands for inoperable, and that could be for a few different reasons. It could be because there’s something mechanically wrong with the vehicle, maybe the vehicle has been damaged, or it could just mean you don’t have the keys and we can’t start it and drive it onto a truck. That’s not a problem. We ship vehicles like this all the time as long as we have the heads up and can prepare the right equipment. It’s not a problem.

The most common type of equipment that we use for an in-op is a winch cable. The truck is equipped with a cable that will attach to your vehicle and pull it onto the truck. That’s how we load it.

Another scenario we run into quite often is with Copart auctions or salvage auctions that are open to the public and a source of purchasing for dealerships as well. They have equipment on site that will allow them to securely and safely put a vehicle onto one of our trucks without a winch, and we would just arrange for that same equipment to be on site, wherever the vehicle’s ultimately going. In-ops or vehicles that are working are something that we handle all the time. As long as we have the heads up and can prepare the equipment it’s a really simple move for us.