Single car transport is shipping one vehicle on a dedicated truck rather than sharing a trailer with 7 to 10 other cars. Because the whole run is paid for by one customer, it costs substantially more per vehicle — often two to four times a shared load — but it delivers faster and with fewer handling steps. Also called dedicated or solo transport.
The term also gets used loosely to mean "I only need one car moved." That is different, and cheaper — that is just a normal booking on a shared truck. There are two ways a single vehicle actually moves on its own: Dedicated run on a small trailer. A hotshot rig or 3-car wedge trailer takes your car and nothing else. The driver goes origin to destination with no other stops. New England to Miami becomes a straight 2 to 3 day run instead of a 5 to 7 day route with six delivery stops.
Dedicated enclosed. A two-car enclosed trailer running one vehicle. Common for auction purchases, concours transport, and cars worth more than the truck. The economics are simple. A full multi-car carrier spreads roughly $2.50 to $4.00 per mile of operating cost across 9 cars. A dedicated run spreads it across one. That is why a $1,200 shared Northeast-to-Florida move becomes roughly $2,500 to $4,500 dedicated. Those are typical market ranges and they swing hard with fuel, season, and whether the driver can find a backhaul.
What you buy with the premium: Most people asking about single car transport actually want speed or certainty, not exclusivity. Before paying a dedicated premium, ask whether a normal shared load with a firm pickup date solves it. Very often it does, at a third of the cost. Dedicated genuinely earns its money in a few cases: an auction car that must clear the lot before storage fees start, a closing date that cannot move, a vehicle so valuable that additional loading cycles are an unacceptable risk, or an estate or divorce situation where the car needs to be gone today.
Because we dispatch our own trucks, we can sometimes structure something in between — your car placed first on and first off a shared load, which gets you most of the speed without the dedicated price. A broker cannot promise that because a broker does not control the loading sequence.
Paying dedicated rates to solve a problem that was really a broker problem. A lot of customers book "single car transport" after a broker missed two pickup windows and they panicked. The underlying issue was not the trailer type — it was that nobody had actually assigned a truck. Before you spend an extra $2,000, ask a carrier with its own fleet for a firm date. See broker vs. carrier. Tell us your dates before you pay for a dedicated truck. We may be able to put you first on and first off one of our own runs. Get a quote or check the cost of shipping a car in 2026.