Shipping Your Car Overseas? This is How You Need to Prepare

What You Need For Overseas Car Shipping

Are you relocating to another country and want to bring your car along as well? When moving a car overseas, you need to be aware of a few important things.

For the sake of this article, we shall focus on the New Zealand standard. Being a nation that takes great pride in its agriculture, New Zealand’s bio-security standards are amongst the highest in the world. Because of this, anything meeting the strict New Zealand standards will likely be accepted without issues by other countries.

Preparing Your Car for Shipping

The important focus of preparing your car for shipping overseas is ensuring foreign biological or toxic material is transported. Consider the following elements when getting your vehicle prepared.

• First of all, your vehicle or car will need to be cleaned and vacuumed thoroughly, both inside and out. 
• Additionally, ensure that all foodstuffs, spills and the like are removed and cleaned.
• Check that any plant material and insects or bugs have been cleaned both from the inside and the outside of the car.
• Ensure that the petrol tank is no more than on-quarter full.

For a full overview of preparing your car for overseas shipping, please read our booklet on Cleaning Your Car For Shipping to New Zealand. Whilst nominally stating “New Zealand”, this booklet contains a handy checklist for preparing your vehicle for shipping to any country.

Without taking these important step in preparing your vehicle for shipping, you may well end up paying for additional cleaning again. More than likely, any cleaning costs incurred at the destination will be considerably more expensive than doing it correctly in the originating country.

Delivering Your Vehicle to the Port

There are two primary way of shipping a car overseas. The first is Roll On Roll Off (RORO), and the other is loading your vehicle into a shipping container. Some country destinations andports will offer both alternatives; other ports will only accept shipping containers.

If you are delivering your car directly to the port for loading onto a RORO (roll on roll off) vessel, once again ensure that the petrol tank is no more than one-quarter full. This is enough fuel for the loading of the car and for your pick up of the car in the destination country. Alos, make sure that you do not put any personal effects in the car. This shipping service is for the export of cars only.

Alternatively, if you are loading your car into a shipping container for transportation you can add additional goods into the container. Remember that seas can get rough, so ensure there are proper packing and padding of additional items in the container.

Extra Resources for Shipping Cars to Various Countries

For a more detailed overview of shipping a car to NZ be sure to read our article on how to ship your car to New Zealand.

SPLS are experienced in getting vehicles shipping safely to many countries. Contact us now for a discussion and a quote.