Sometimes transportation of a vehicle from an auction to your lot can go awry. In this video, I tell two of my favorite stories about crazy cases involving vehicle transport. Trust me – they’re wild. Check out this short video to find out what happened.
Below is a transcript of the video:
Now we’re going to talk about transportation from the auction. It’s critically important that the dealer hire a reputable transportation company to transport the vehicle from the auction to the dealer if the dealer is not going to pick it up themselves. I represented a client who had a vehicle they purchased up in the Northeast and they had a transport company come pick up the vehicle to transport it to a port on the East Coast to ship it to Africa. The car never made it to the port and the transport driver was given the title because the title had to go to the shipping company at the port.
The transport driver stole the car, sold the car with the title, so it didn’t create a new title because they had the original, and we had to go through a rabbit hole of crazy issues with criminal, civil, a case here, a case there, here being Georgia, another case up in the East Coast state where this was going to be shipped out, and it was a complete and total mess. A lot of that was because the insurance for the transport company had been canceled about a month before the transportation happened and that would have been almost impossible because most dealers don’t verify insurance. They verify it for their customers, but they don’t verify it for transport. They see that the transport driver has insurance and they accept it as fact. Transport drivers like customers can be fraudsters. So it’s very important that the transport company is vetted and that the dealer is comfortable and confident with the information being provided both by the transport company and the dispatch that the vehicle will be there.
As another example, I’ve seen another case where a transport company was delivering a vehicle and stopped in the median, in the middle of the road, to deliver the vehicle to the dealer, stopped in one of those center lane turn lanes. Transport truck stopped there, was taking the vehicle off the truck, took the vehicle off the truck, where somebody jumped into the car and stole it.
This was a very expensive Bentley. Somebody jumped in the car, the keys were in it, and they stole it. There was a big issue on insurance, whether or not the transport driver’s insurance covered it or once it got off of the truck, was it now the responsibility of the dealer? So this is just something to keep in mind. We resolved that case, we didn’t actually get to the legal answer one way or the other, but these kinds of things come up.
They don’t come up often, but they do come up every now and again. They’re just something to be aware of as a dealer is retaining a transport company to transport a vehicle either to the auction, from the auction to a customer, from a customer or any other type of transportation of a vehicle.
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