Most experts in the field of auto shipping will have a preference for the open carrier method because of the ease of loading and unloading vehicles. Within the space of two hours, somewhere around 33 carriers can be loaded to maximum capacity. Contrast this with the closed container method where only one car may be loaded and lifted on to the carrier in the same time frame. The closed container operations require special heavy-duty equipment at both the loading and unloading sites. A standard container terminal is not equipped to deal with cars and a special area apart from the central terminal must be allocated for the process of loading and unloading as well as storage, including storage for the essential equipment. This separate area must be secured more thoroughly than the main terminal. The carriers themselves can handle roughly half the number of vehicles as an open carrier.
The safety of a car in a container depends primarily on how well it is secured inside and on how professionally the vehicle is handled by the special loading-unloading equipment. If the container is not tailor-made for car transportation or the specific car brand, the process of securing it inside is rather complicated. In any case, it takes a lot of special wedging, tying, and supporting to secure a car in a container. Damage may occur if in the initial process mistakes are made which may remain undiscovered until the car reaches it destination and is unloaded.
In the open carrier damage may occur because the car is more easily accessible by people intent on doing it harm. Some cars have even been known to arrive with bullet holes. The closed container, while not totally inaccessible is far more so than the open one.
Very long trains which are open carriers may run into difficulty when crossing foreign borders. Not every country has the technology to ship by this method and the documentation and bureaucratic policies of the different countries can easily disrupt a shipment. Sometimes when long trains cross borders after loading at a factory in a foreign territory, the crew may be required to unload and then reload the cargo into more apt carriers in the country on the other side of the border. This not only delays the time of delivery, but also further exposes the vehicle to possible damage.
Innovative technologies, such as Trans-Rack, may help solve such problems, but in some countries they are only now coming into use, while still not all major countries offer wide-spread closed container shipping.
What Trans-Rack does is enable the carrier to increase its load of vehicles within closed containers while reducing the cost of transportation by around 25%. It also offers safer loading and unloading to guard against damage to the vehicles. The cars utilizing the Trans-Rack system have a much greater chance of arriving intact and undamaged. Severe experiments have been undertaken which included dropping a loaded container from heights of 5 meters causing harm to the containers but not the interior cargo. Trans-Rack is much easier to load and unload, thereby less time is required in the process. A full container can be loaded in 30 minutes. The system also comes with standardized systems of securing the vehicles which not only makes them safer but helps keeps the cost of transportation down.
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