I passed one earlier today on the interstate carrying some pretty nice cars. All sorts of things could get kicked up from the road over a long transport and nick the paint or cause a dent. Even if the entire trailer isn’t covered, you’d think whoever is purchasing the car, whether a dealer or an individual would at least prefer to have a cover on the car itself.
Wind. A cover being whipped about at 60+ mph for nearly the whole trip could do a lot of damage. Hardly any debris will reach the cars (got a lot of bad spots on your car from this? I don’t.).
I don’t think that you could open the car doors and get out if the trailers had walls. Full sized cars are around six and one half feet wide. Trailers are limited to being eight and one half feet wide. Add in space for the ramp lift hydraulics, the car doors and the trailer walls themselves and the car doors can only open a few inches.
Trailer walls would also make it difficult to impossible to install chains to hold the cars in place.
It may just be cheaper to address any damage than to install, remove, store and inspect the wraps.
How do you know that all autotransporters are uncovered? You wouldn’t have seen the ones that were covered.
A lot of the semi trailers that have canvas sides (called curtainsides in the trucking industry) are carrying cars. The whole side rolls up for easy access of loading and securing the cars.
Keep in mind that everything about those cars (the paint, in this case) is all designed to be traveling that fast down the highway. Most cars aren’t covered with dings. Also, most of the debris is getting launched off the road by car tires and going straight back, so the tractor is going to get the brunt of it.
Having said that, many new cars are shipped with plastic film covering their horizontal surfaces. In this picture, the cars aren’t white, they’re all different colors and covered with white film for shipping.
I’ve also seen new cars moving by rail an (mostly) enclosed trains like this. FTR, by ‘mostly’, I mean the sides had thin gaps in them. Enough that you can make out the shape of cars in them as they pass by.
I’ve seen those, and they often have a strange connection to the second trailer too.
The curtain sides, well, the trains too.
You might not always recognize covered car carriers, but they definitely exist. I’m getting quotes now to ship my car long distance. It’s just up to 50% more covered than open, also depending hard or soft cover trailer.
Some new car sellers use covered trailers pretty exclusively. I’ve often seen covered trailers with the BMW logo for example and don’t recall seeing groups of BMW’s being shipped in open trailers in recent years. As mentioned the rail cars used to ship automobiles are almost always covered. That’s also to limit vandalism though, which could be a factor in road transport too when the trailer sits overnight.
Other people noted how your car moves fast down the road without any cover when you drive it. However it seems it might be somewhat more common for stuff to get thrown up on (or thrown at) and damage your car on an open trailer. I have no stats source for that, but people complain about it fairly often in their reviews of car transport services, again I’ve been looking at them lately. 
Maybe it’s more common or they just get more pissed off maybe if they weren’t driving, for some reason.
Also the transport services will tell you the car is likely to be really dirty after a long trip on an open trailer, if you care about that.
You could ship them inside a normal-sized 18-wheeler. (Cite: Night Rider.)
I could see air swirling around behind the tractor and getting into an open trailer. I’m not sure, though, that it would be strong enough to pull in road debris. But, like you said, people are probably a lot pickier in these cases. Either to try to get the transport company to fix an existing issue or because they never looked closely enough to notice that ding or scratch.
you can load more cars on an open carrier while staying within the maximum trailer length permitted. Cassens Transport can put 10 cars on their open carriers while Reliable Carriers might only get 6 or 7 in their enclosed trailers.
Years ago, before car-bearing train cars became (mostly) covered, organized criminals figured out how to plunder the cars’ transmission while the trains were moving. Crews would board a slow-moving train, and hastily remove the new transmissions from the cars, let them drop on the lower-level cars, and shove them off the side of the train. Beyond the missing transmissions, the company had a lot of badly dented roofs in the new Cadillacs. That was enough to warrant the new covered train cars.
Never heard of this. And it would be easier to do when the train car is sitting still in a yard.
When I worked for a railroad, there were 2 reasons that we were switching to the new, more expensive enclosed car transports:
- Railroad cars travel above a track with stone ballast between the rails (unlike road transport, which goes over smooth asphalt or concrete roads). So there are a lot more rocks around that could hit a car on the train, and bigger rocks than ones on highways.
- Misbehaving kids like to throw things at trains going by. They either stand on overpasses or alongside the track somewhere and throw things – mostly rocks, which are right there between the railroad ties. This causes damage to the cars being transported, which the railroad has to pay for.
The second reason was by far the most frequent & most important.
Were the transmissions in any kind of usable state after being dropped and then shoved off the side of a moving train? I guess they must have been or the crooks wouldn’t do it. Just seems so odd.
The logistics must have been tricky. Did the thieves have to plan in advance where they’d push the transmissions off? And what was their escape route like; do trains routinely go slow enough to jump off without injury? I assume they’d want to be well on their way before the train came to the next yard and a bunch of damaged Cadillacs were discovered.
Back in the day, this was part of the reason why you bought cars from dealers. Part of the dealers responsibility was adding optional features (Non factory fitted. Like windscreen wipers), and fixing up the paintwork for delivery to the customer. A process called “detailing”.
Of course now the factory delivers covered in film. Which is why “detailing” now means just washing the car.
I doubt the railway would pay for that sort for damage. The railway would pay for the stains from the train leaking its fluids or gases, construction or maintenance work, or for the straps breaking (cleary they only break if the train misbehaves … such as an emergency stop or a jumping effect on the start. ) because they were caused by the railway itself… Duty of care. If a reporter said the throwing of stones was expensive to the railway, they may mean that the railway infrastructure is damaged, experience expensive delays or that the railway would lose customers.
If people were getting onto moving trains to steal car parts, I’d expect them to be stealing catalytic converters. Much lighter, comparatively easy to hack off the tailpipe, and the money’s inside with the platinum pellets, so no worries if they’re dented by being chucked off a moving train.
Every now and then, there’s a rash of cat thefts from cars parked at transit stations around here, so there’s definitely decent money in those things.
Cite?
Frankly, it sounds implausible. A lot of work (it’s no ten-minute job even with a crew), requires carrying a fair amount of tools, far less than ideal work space, virtually impossible without a jack – did you ever try carrying an automotive shop jack? – and as mentioned above the logistics of avoiding damage and locating the trannies are quite problematic. There are any number of ways to make money that are easier, more profitable, and less dangerous. I find it extremely hard to believe anyone would do this.
I agree that this sounds like an urban legend. It ws certainly never mentioned as a problem when I worked at the railroad.
What was mentioned as a problem was theft from railcars while they were parked on a siding in the yard, waiting to go into the next train. That was a big problem.
And removing transmissions from cars would be much easier there than doing so on a moving trin. Plus there is a lot of freight on trains that is more valuable (and smaller & lighter) than auto transmissions. And more sell-able – transmissions have serial numbers engraved on them.
Most new cars that are transported via open air transporters have a white plastic film over certain areas of the car that is removed once the vehicles reach the dealership. This is to cut down on dings, etc. in transport. There are enclosed car carriersthat are used to transport many high end luxury vehicles, you just don’t realize that’s what they are because they are enclosed.