Towit provides enclosed and open vehicle transport across the UK. We use Brian James trailers and work with private owners, dealers, and the motor trade.
If you just want the short version: most single-car movements in the UK cost between £1.20 and £2.00 per mile on open transport and between £2.00 and £3.50 per mile enclosed, with minimum charges meaning that even a short hop rarely comes in under £150. The long version, which is worth five minutes of your time, explains why two quotes for the same journey can be hundreds of pounds apart, what you are actually paying for, and how to make sure the price you are given is the price you pay.
Car transport in the UK is priced per job, not from a national rate card, so every figure in this guide is a typical market range rather than a promise. That said, ranges are genuinely useful for sanity-checking quotes. If someone quotes you £95 to move a car 250 miles, you should be asking what corner is being cut. If someone quotes £900 for the same job on an open trailer, you should be asking what the extra £500 is buying.
Three inputs set the baseline of every quote: the distance between collection and delivery, the type of vehicle being moved, and whether the car travels on an open trailer or inside an enclosed one. Everything else, from timing pressure to a locked auction compound, adjusts the price up or down from that baseline.
It is also worth understanding what kind of company you are dealing with. A fixed-quote operator like Towit prices the job, books it, and moves it. A bidding marketplace auctions your job to whoever wants it, which produces a different kind of price entirely, and we cover that difference later in this guide.
Swipe through the eight things a transport company weighs up when it prices your movement. When you understand these, every quote you receive starts making sense.
Swipe to see all eight factors
The single biggest factor. Fuel, driver hours, and wear scale with miles. But pricing is not linear: the first 50 miles are the most expensive per mile because fixed costs dominate short jobs.
Size, weight, value, and ground clearance all matter. A long-wheelbase van, a lowered supercar, and a standard hatchback are three different jobs even on identical routes.
Enclosed transport typically costs 50 to 100 percent more than open. It buys full protection from weather, debris, and attention, which is why valuable cars always travel enclosed.
Same-day and fixed-date movements price higher than flexible ones. If your car can move when a transporter is already heading that way, you benefit from the shared routing.
Tight streets, restricted compounds, ports, and rural lanes add loading time and planning. Easy access at both ends keeps the job efficient and the price down.
A car that cannot be driven onto the trailer needs winch loading, which takes more time and equipment. Expect a modest premium, and always declare it up front.
Transport pricing quietly depends on what the trailer does after your delivery. Routes with likely return work price keener than one-way trips into empty territory.
Condition reports, insured professional drivers, and proper soft-strap equipment are part of a professional price. Quotes that undercut everyone usually thin out exactly here.
Per-mile thinking is useful, but it needs one correction: the industry does not price miles, it prices jobs. Every job includes the same fixed work regardless of distance. The transporter has to travel to your collection point, inspect and photograph the car, load it at the correct angle, secure it with soft straps, complete the paperwork, drive, and then do the whole handover again in reverse at delivery. That is comfortably two hours of skilled work before a single motorway mile is counted.
On a 300-mile movement, those fixed costs melt into the total and the per-mile rate looks lean. On a 30-mile movement, they are most of the bill, which is why a short hop can cost £150 to £250 and feel disproportionate. It is not; it is the same fixed work with less driving attached.
This is also why you should be suspicious of very low quotes on short jobs. The fixed work cannot be skipped, so a rock-bottom price means it is being rushed: no condition report, hurried strapping, or equipment that is not right for your car.
Send your postcodes and the car on WhatsApp. Fixed quote, usually within minutes.
Open transport, on a trailer like the Brian James T Transporter, is the workhorse of the industry. The car is properly secured, professionally handled, and fully visible to weather and road. For dealer stock, auction purchases, lease deliveries, and everyday cars, it is the sensible, economical choice, and it is what most of the UK market runs on.
Enclosed transport, in a trailer like the Brian James Race Transporter 7, wraps the car in a protected environment for the whole journey: no rain, no road spray, no stone chips, no salt, and no eyes on it. The trailer has a powered tilt bed for low cars and soft over-wheel straps that never touch bodywork. It costs more because the equipment is more specialised and the whole trailer is dedicated to protecting one valuable vehicle.
The decision is really about consequence, not luxury. If a stone chip on the journey would be an annoyance, go open. If it would mean respraying a £20,000 paint job or apologising to a customer collecting their dream car, go enclosed. We wrote a full comparison in our enclosed vs open car transport guide if you want the complete picture.
The table below shows typical market ranges for common UK routes, assuming a standard running car with straightforward access at both ends. Treat them as orientation, not a menu: your fixed quote reflects your exact job.
| Route | Approx. Distance | Open (typical) | Enclosed (typical) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manchester to London | 200 miles | £280 – £420 | £500 – £750 |
| Birmingham to Glasgow | 290 miles | £360 – £540 | £650 – £950 |
| London to Edinburgh | 400 miles | £480 – £700 | £850 – £1,250 |
| Leeds to Bristol | 210 miles | £290 – £430 | £520 – £780 |
| Local move (under 50 miles) | < 50 miles | £150 – £250 | £250 – £400 |
Notice how the enclosed column is not simply double the open column on every row. Longer routes dilute the fixed handling costs, so the enclosed premium narrows as a percentage the further the car travels. If you are moving a valuable car a long way, enclosed transport is proportionally at its cheapest.
A car that does not start, does not select gear, or cannot be driven for any reason changes the loading plan. Instead of being driven up the ramps, it is winched on under control, which needs the right equipment and more time. Expect a modest premium over the same route with a runner, and read our non-runner transport guide if this is your situation, because access and honesty about the car's condition matter even more there.
Very low cars are a different kind of adjuster. A car with a splitter a few centimetres off the tarmac cannot be loaded on standard ramps without damage, so it needs a low-angle tilt bed. That usually points you to enclosed equipment anyway, which is where those cars belong on value grounds too.
Other honest adjusters include: collections from compounds with restricted hours, deliveries that must hit a fixed handover slot, oversized vehicles, and jobs where the paperwork at a port or auction adds process time. None of these are padding; they are all real time and real planning.
When you compare quotes, make sure you are comparing the same service. A proper transport price includes insured professional drivers, with cover for your specific movement confirmed before booking. It includes correct equipment: soft over-wheel straps that hold the car by its tyres rather than hooks and chains that load the chassis. And it includes a photographic condition report at both ends, so the state of the car at collection and at delivery is documented, timestamped, and beyond argument.
That last item is worth dwelling on. The condition report is the cheapest insurance in the whole transaction. It protects you if the car is damaged, it protects the transporter from claims about pre-existing marks, and it makes the handover a two-minute confirmation instead of a negotiation. If a quote does not include one, the price is not really lower; the risk has just been moved onto you.
Much of the UK market runs through bidding marketplaces where you post your job and drivers compete for it. The winning bid is usually the lowest, which sounds like a saving until you think about what winning-by-being-cheapest selects for: the oldest equipment, the thinnest insurance, the most crowded multi-drop schedule, and the least time allocated to your car.
A fixed quote from a named operator works differently. You know the price before anything moves, you know whose trailer the car is on, and the same company that quoted you is accountable for the delivery. Towit quotes directly over WhatsApp and matches your movement to a suitable insured driver; there is no auction and no mystery about who turns up.
The honest advice: if you are moving a £2,000 runabout with flexible dates and you enjoy managing the process, a marketplace can work out. If the car matters, if the date matters, or if you simply do not want to spend your week refereeing bids, a fixed quote is the cheaper option once your time and risk are priced in.
There are four levers that genuinely reduce price. First, flexibility: if the car can move any day this week rather than Thursday at 2pm, it can be slotted onto a route the transporter is already running, and that efficiency is shared with you. Second, honest choice of trailer: enclosed protection is essential for some cars and unnecessary for others, so do not pay for enclosure a ten-year-old family SUV does not need.
Third, accurate information. Every surprise on the day, from a non-runner nobody mentioned to a car parked in an underground garage the trailer cannot reach, costs time and can require a second visit. Telling the full story up front gets you the right price once, not a cheap price followed by an argument. Fourth, sensible access: if your street is tight, agreeing a nearby meeting point in advance keeps loading quick and safe.
What does not save money: choosing a quote purely because it is the lowest number on the screen, skipping the condition report, or letting a valuable car travel on equipment that was not designed for it. Those savings have a habit of becoming the most expensive part of the whole transaction.
Before booking anything, plenty of people price the do-it-yourself routes, so let us do that honestly. Option one is driving the car yourself. For a running, insured, road-legal car this is the obvious baseline, but it is rarely free: a one-way collection means a train or flight to the car, fuel and possibly an overnight stay, a full day or two of your time, and several hundred miles added to the odometer. On a nearly-new or collector car, the mileage alone can cost more in value than professional transport costs in cash, and none of it comes with a condition record if something goes wrong en route.
Option two is hiring a trailer or transporter van. The hire itself looks cheap until you add the tow vehicle capable of pulling a loaded trailer legally, the licence entitlement to tow it, the insurance questions nobody reads until afterwards, and the experience of loading, strapping, and reversing a three-and-a-half tonne combination. Loading is where cars get damaged, and it is exactly the part first-timers do under pressure in a strange car park. For a runabout the risk may be tolerable; for anything with value it seldom is.
The honest summary: DIY suits short moves of cheap, running cars by people already comfortable with trailers. Everything else is usually cheaper done professionally once time, mileage, risk, and equipment are counted at their real prices.
Everything above describes one-off pricing, but a large share of UK vehicle movements are trade work: dealers delivering sold cars, groups rebalancing stock between sites, leasing companies managing handovers, and traders clearing auction compounds weekly. Volume changes the economics for both sides, and pricing should reflect it.
Regular work lets a transporter plan routes instead of reacting to them, fill return legs instead of running empty, and schedule fixed days instead of quoting from scratch. Those efficiencies are real money, and a sensible operator shares them: per-movement rates on standing arrangements come in below one-off pricing for the same routes. At Towit, dealers and trade customers can set up recurring delivery work and scheduled site-to-site movements priced with volume in mind.
If you are on the trade side, the useful move is to describe your typical pattern, sites, volumes, and deadlines rather than asking for a generic rate card. Vehicle logistics priced against your actual flow is consistently cheaper than the same movements priced one at a time, and it turns transport from a weekly negotiation into infrastructure.
To price a job properly, a transporter needs five things: the collection postcode, the delivery postcode, the make and model of the vehicle, whether it runs and rolls, and any timing constraints. With those, Towit returns a fixed quote and a realistic ETA, usually within minutes, over WhatsApp. The number you get is the number you pay; the survey work is done in the quote, not on your invoice.
If your movement is more specialist, the same principles from this guide apply with extra detail on top: see our guides to supercar transport, classic car transport, auction collection, and UK to Europe movements.
Collection postcode, delivery postcode, make and model. That is all we need.
The pricing questions we answer most often.