While shipping is the most reliable option for moving your vehicle, sometimes the costs can be a little too much for your wallet to handle. In the right circumstances, it can be possible to transport a car for less than the cost of flying over and driving it yourself. Just as you need a way to get your car across the country, there are likely people out there who need to get themselves across, and could use a car to do it! Not only is this option much cheaper than shipping, it’s also generally faster than most car shipping services.

If you like the idea of saving money by having someone drive your car for you, but want a bit more security or don’t want to deal with finding a driver yourself, you might consider driveaway services. A driveaway service finds a driver who is looking for cheap travel from point A to point B, and a customer who is looking for cheap vehicle transport from point A to point B, and hooks them up.

Here are some things to look for in a driveaway service:

• Driver Criteria. The idea of a complete stranger driving your car can be a little unsettling: you don’t know what type of driver they are, you don’t know what might happen while they’re on the road, and you don’t even know if they will legitimately get the vehicle to you. To ease some of your concerns, every service has a set of criteria they use to choose which drivers they accept.
• Professional vs Amateur. The criteria above is a way of screening amateur drivers, people who get paid not with cash, but with a cheap ride. There are driveaway services that offer professional drivers as well – people who frequently do driveaways and are actually paid for their services.
• Liability Insurance. Most driveaway services will have some sort of liability insurance should something happen to your vehicle during transport, but the extent to which that insurance covers you will vary. If you are trying to choose between two potentially good services, compare their liability policies and choose the one that seems to have greater coverage.