You have just bought a car 200 miles away. You have paid for it, you have not seen it in the metal, and now a stranger you have only ever spoken to through Facebook Messenger wants your address, your keys and the name of the person who will hand them over.
That is the moment most people realise they have thought very carefully about which car to buy, and barely at all about who is going to bring it to them.
Vehicle transport is one of the few things people still book almost entirely on price. Three quotes come back, the cheapest wins, and nobody asks a single question about what is actually being bought. Most of the time it works out. When it does not, the gap between the cheapest quote and a properly run operator turns out to have been the most expensive twenty pounds anyone ever saved.
This is not a warning about cowboys. It is a list of six questions worth asking anyone who offers to move your vehicle — including us.
This is the big one, and it is the one almost nobody asks properly.
Does the cover exist at all? Goods-in-transit insurance covers your vehicle while it is on somebody else’s trailer. Motor trade policies and public liability are not the same thing and will not do the same job.
What is the limit per vehicle? This is what catches people out. A policy might cover £20,000 per vehicle. That is fine for a five-year-old hatchback and no use whatsoever for the classic you have just spent £60,000 on. If your vehicle is worth more than the limit, the difference is coming out of your pocket, and you will not discover that until the worst possible day.
And is the policy actually still in force? Here is the part almost nobody outside the trade knows. A certificate is a snapshot of a moment. There is a trick that goes around this industry where an operator takes out a policy, receives the certificate, then cancels inside the fourteen-day cooling-off period and gets the premium back — while carrying on sending that certificate out to customers for months afterwards. The document looks completely genuine, because it is. It is just void.
So do not stop at the certificate. Ask for a letter from their insurance broker confirming the cover is current, or ring the broker named on the document and ask them directly. It takes five minutes and it is the single most useful thing you can do before handing over your keys.
The national dealer groups and the big auction houses already work this way — they will not let a transporter onto site without current proof, precisely because of the void-certificate problem. If that is the standard they insist on before letting somebody move a stock car, it is a fair standard for your own.
Some quotes come from a broker who will sell the job on to whoever happens to be nearby. You are quoted by one company and a completely different vehicle turns up, driven by somebody whose name you have never heard.
That is not automatically bad. Plenty of subcontracted work is done well. But you should know it is happening, because it changes who is responsible, whose insurance applies and who you ring when the phone stops being answered.
Ask directly: are you moving it yourself, or are you selling the job on?
This one surprises people, mostly because it is so rarely offered in this trade.
A driver collecting your vehicle is often at your home address, sometimes when you are out, occasionally with your house keys or your spare key in their hand. In almost any other line of work where somebody turns up at your door, you would expect them to have been checked.
A basic DBS check is not difficult or expensive to obtain — it currently costs £21.50 through GOV.UK, anyone over 16 can apply for their own, and it comes back in a matter of days. Which means an operator who has not bothered has not been prevented from doing it. They have simply decided it was not worth doing.
Straps or chains, where they attach, whether the vehicle is winched or driven on, whether the transport is open or enclosed. The right answer depends on the vehicle, and any operator worth using will tell you which they are running rather than letting you assume.
We run open transport. We say so up front, because it is the honest answer for the overwhelming majority of movements and because you deserve to know before you book rather than when the trailer arrives. If your vehicle genuinely needs enclosed cover, you should be told that plainly by whoever you ask.
The honest answer to this is not “we take loads of photos”. Anyone moving several vehicles a day cannot photograph every panel of every car, and an operator who promises it either is not doing it or is not doing much work.
What you should expect is a visual condition check sheet — a proper written record of the vehicle’s condition, completed at collection and again at delivery. It is what the dealer groups and auction houses use, and it is what settles the question of whether that scratch was already there long before anybody starts arguing about it.
And you should expect to be told at the time if something is not right. If a driver finds a dent, a scratch or damage that was not mentioned when the job was booked, the moment to hear about it is standing next to the vehicle at collection — with a photograph — not when it arrives at your end and it is your word against theirs.
This matters most if you have bought online and never seen the car in person. The person collecting it is the first honest set of eyes on what you have actually bought. Whether they tell you what they can see tells you everything about who you have hired.
Not a contact form. Not a general enquiries line. A number that reaches a person who knows about your job.
Things do occasionally go wrong in transport — traffic, weather, a seller who is not in when they said they would be. What separates a good experience from a bad one is almost never whether a problem occurred. It is whether anybody picked up the phone.
We are a small, independent, owner-run operation based in Hambleton, Poulton-le-Fylde, covering Lancashire and the whole of the UK.
The person who quotes you is the person who drives the transporter and the person who hands your keys over at the other end. There is nobody to pass you between.
On insurance: we carry £100,000 goods-in-transit cover per vehicle and £5 million public liability. Our documents are held online and we will send them before you ask. We also hold a to-whom-it-may-concern letter from our broker confirming every policy in one place — the thing that proves cover is live rather than simply that it once existed. We keep it because the dealer groups, auction houses and trade platforms we work for require it, and it is yours to see on the same terms.
On condition: every job gets a visual check sheet completed at collection and at delivery. If we find something that was not declared — a scratch, a dent, damage nobody mentioned — we photograph it and tell you there and then, before the vehicle moves. It protects you and it protects us, and it means nothing is ever a surprise at the other end.
On knowing where it is: our transporters are fitted with hardwired live tracking. Once your vehicle is loaded we can text you a tracking link that shows you where it is on a map in real time, so you are not sat at home guessing. The link is time-limited to your job and switches off when it is done.
Beyond that: we hold a basic DBS check. We turn up in branded workwear, so you know who is standing on your driveway. We run open transport and we tell you that at the point of quoting.
Behind that there is forty years in the motor trade, a Transport Manager CPC qualification, and seventeen Google reviews from people who have actually used us.
We will not always be the cheapest quote you get. If price is the only thing that matters on a straightforward, low-value movement, there will usually be somebody who will do it for less.
What the difference buys you is knowing exactly who has your vehicle, that they are covered for what it is worth, that they have been checked, and that they will answer the phone. On a car you actually care about, that stops being an extra and starts being the entire point.
If you have a vehicle to move and you would like the certificate, the checks and a straight answer before you commit to anything, get in touch.
Call 07385 672501
Email info@ws-logistics.co.uk
www.ws-logistics.co.uk
WS Logistics….Nationwide, Insured and Run by the owner 🚛
