2024 Sherpa Auto Transport Review

Sherpa Auto Transport has made some tremendous strides in pricing and customer service, making it our top pick in 2024. While Sherpa has always been known for its customer service (and free car washes), the Price Lock Promise and online quoting tool have really impressed customers and kept pricing competitive. We love to see a company that continues to innovate in the interest of customers, and that’s why Sherpa takes our number one spot in car shipping.

Check out how Sherpa Auto Transport compares to its competitors in our article on the Best Car Shipping Companies.

The average price to ship your car with Sherpa Auto Transport is around $1,010—about $100 lower than the industry average. If you’re only going a few hundred miles, you may get away with shipping a mid-size car (on an open trailer) for as low as $375. On the other end, it can be almost $2,000 to cross-country ship your Ford F150 in an enclosed carrier.

Because of Sherpa’s Price Lock Promise, your quoted and final prices are likely to be the same. Why? Because Sherpa agrees to contribute up to $300 toward covering any changes (which are pretty common) to your final invoice.

Sherpa Auto Transport’s initial quotes and final prices are often lower than its largest competitors—and there's no sticker shock when you get your final bill. In the auto transport industry, it’s not unusual for prices to increase upwards of 25% from initial quote to the time your final bill arrives—but Sherpa works hard to make sure its quotes are accurate and doesn't tack on surprise fees you weren't expecting.

But not only are Sherpa’s initial quotes about 10% lower than the industry average, the transport broker also kicks in $300 with its Price Lock Promise toward your price if it goes up during the move—meaning its final prices often beat the other places.

Let’s give you an example: Say a transport company quotes you $1,108 to ship your car (which is the average price for open transport shipping in 2024). That number isn’t usually what you pay—it’s an estimate. From there, the car shipping company submits your shipment details for truck drivers to bid on and gives them $1,108 as the target price. Unfortunately, there usually aren’t many takers at the lowest price, so the transport company has to incrementally increase the price until a driver accepts.

Once the driver finally accepts, the lowest (and final) shipping price can be about 25% higher than your original quote. In most cases, that would mean you have to pay that extra $270. But with Sherpa’s guarantee, the difference is completely covered. Bottom line: most other companies make you pay the difference, but Sherpa covers the cost for you.

And as the cherry on top, we analyzed hundreds of quotes and found that Sherpa’s initial estimate is about $100 less expensive than the industry average. So you know your pricing is competitive, not just reliable.

Sherpa Auto Transport says there are four things that affect the overall cost of shipping your vehicle:

1. Distance: The farther you ship your car, the more expensive it is. Shipping to a neighboring state is cheaper than shipping from coast to coast.
2. Car size and weight: If you’ve got a small, light vehicle, it costs less to ship your car than it costs for a heavy-duty truck. Heavier cars take more fuel to transport, and that means it costs more to ship them.
3. Condition of your vehicle: As long as your car’s wheels, brakes, and steering wheel function, Sherpa can transport it for you. But FYI—there’s an extra charge if the car won’t start.
4. Method of transport. Sherpa offers both open and enclosed trailers, and while open trailers generally cost less, enclosed trailers offer more protection from the elements on the road.

Sherpa Auto Transport requires all its carriers to have a minimum of $1 million in liability coverage and $100,000 in cargo insurance. Plus, Sherpa also requires carriers to list them as a policy certificate holder so it can help you file a claim if your car gets dented or scratched in transit. But you can rest easy knowing that Sherpa carefully monitors its trucking safety records across all carriers to minimize your chance of damage.

We already touched this earlier, but Sherpa offers both open and enclosed transport options for almost any type of vehicle:

• Family vehicles
• Personal cars
• Luxury and classic automobiles
• Antique vehicles
• Exotic cars
• Collectible autos

With Sherpa’s Price Lock Promise, you know you have a cushion of up to $300 for your final car shipping price. We already mentioned this above, but it’s important enough to cover again because it’s something customers rave about in reviews. It isn’t just this company’s best feature—it’s one of the single best car shipping offerings we’ve seen with any auto transporter.

At the end of the day, Sherpa’s transparency with its customers is what truly sells us. Sherpa could tell you it has the lowest prices and then increase your final price at the last minute, like many other shippers in the industry. But it wants you to be a customer for life—so Sherpa tells you from the get-go that car shipping pricing is funky, and then pledges to cover up to $300 of potential price increases.

To be perfectly honest, that’s virtually unheard of in the car shipping industry. And it’s one of the reasons why Sherpa lands in our top spot on our Best Car Shipping Companies list . . . even though it’s been in business for only seven years.

Sherpa Auto Transport makes it a top priority to find the safest drivers to transport your vehicle. And while the carrier selects its drivers from the industry’s shared pool of more than 13,000 carriers, Sherpa does the legwork to find the best ones:

• Sherpa reviews government records. Sherpa reviews all public safety, regulatory, and insurance information from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) for each of its carriers. If there are any red flags, it won’t work with that carrier.
• Sherpa analyzes the data. Sherpa maintains accurate statistics across the details of all shipments and each carrier’s performance, so it can maintain consistency and accountability for each driver and shipment.
• Sherpa follows a “do not use” list. If a carrier fails to meet Sherpa’s safety requirements and service expectations, they are added to an internal “do not use” list. Drivers only get one chance to make a mistake with Sherpa, so you know it’s not messing around.
• Sherpa provides extra insurance coverage. We already touched on this, but Sherpa requires carriers to add them as a certificate holder to their insurance policies. In the car shipping industry, this isn’t necessarily a standard.

Customer service is the cornerstone of operations at Sherpa Auto Transport. The company’s founders experienced their fair share of car shipping pitfalls—from fickle pricing to poor communication to unreliable carriers. It soon became clear to the best solution to the industry’s biggest drawbacks was to start a new kind of auto shipping company.

The founders focused on providing customers with unparalleled customer service and even implemented the industry’s first Clean Car Guarantee (free car wash) with each shipment (an offer many companies now use).

Sherpa also implemented its innovative Price Lock Promise to make customers more comfortable with their final bills—and other companies can’t quite measure up to the same value of the offer.

We know Sherpa isn’t perfect, but its guaranteed pricing and strong customer service produces happy customers. In fact, Sherpa has maintained an average customer review rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars for the last 2 years.

A historical review of Sherpa Auto Transport shows the company has been an impressive industry-player since it opened. After being founded in 2017, Sherpa quickly landed a spot on our list of best car shipping companies. And now, in 2024, Sherpa is our favorite auto transporter.

We can tell you with confidence: it isn’t easy for new companies to break into the car shipping industry, and many close before they reach their one-year anniversaries. But Sherpa continues to innovate and grow with the industry, making it a real force to be reckoned with—at least for its competitors. For example, Sherpa’s prices have dropped considerably, going from 10% above the industry average in 2020, to 9% below the average in 2022. That’s a change of almost 20% in only two years. That’s pretty impressive, indeed.

Another big change is Sherpa’s online quoting tool, which provides customers with a quote in less than two minutes and enables many customers to book their shipment fully online. This, combined with Sherpa’s competitive pricing and services, makes it easy to understand why Sherpa’s average customer review rating (4.8 out of 5 stars) hasn’t budged in over two years.

It’s a fact: Sherpa belongs at the top of our best car shipping companies list. Between its $300 Price Lock Promise, $20 Clean Car Guarantee, and ability to find drivers who are the cream of the crop, it’s no wonder Sherpa receives an average customer rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars. Sherpa puts its money where its mouth is, and we think that’s pretty great.

Do you like Sherpa’s Price Lock Promise?

Move.org calculates industry averages and identifies pricing trends by following a fourfold research approach:

1. Compare quotes. We collected nearly 700 quotes from 10 different companies. The car shipping quotes included prices for a motorcycle, car, SUV, and truck across 11 distances with both open and enclosed transport.
2. Mystery shopping. We contacted auto transport companies posing as customers to gather pricing data and learn how the brokers formulate their prices.
3. Site visits. We invited several industry leaders to visit our headquarters in Salt Lake City, UT, and explain what goes into their pricing. We then compared their answers to information we independently obtained to verify accuracy.
4. Annual calendar. We repeat this process every year and save our data to compare trends over time.

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