Car Shipping to Canada from the UK

The UK leg: enclosed from your door to the port

The move starts where the car sits — a house, a showroom, a storage unit, an auction hall. Never a terminal, never a car park where you meet a stranger with a clipboard.

The car is loaded onto a Brian James Race Transporter 7 on an electric tilt bed, so the approach angle is shallow enough for a low front splitter without ramps and packers. The rear door is powered. A synthetic-rope winch pulls anything that will not or should not be driven under its own power. Once it is on the deck it sits on low-profile chocks and is held by wheel-sleeve straps over the tyres — nothing touches a wishbone, a subframe or a painted surface. The daylight roof means we can inspect it properly at either end without a torch.

Before the door closes we photograph the car in detail and sign a condition report with you. That document is the reference point for the entire journey, and it is the same document we hold up against the car in Canada. If the car is a modern classic or a competition car, the specifics of that first hour matter more than anything that happens later; our enclosed car transport page sets out the loading method in full. From your door the car travels sealed to the departure port, still on the same trailer, still with the same crew.

The sea leg: container, not roll-on roll-off

Two ways exist to send a car across the Atlantic. Roll-on roll-off means the car is driven up a ramp by a port employee, parked on an open vehicle deck with several thousand others, and driven off at the far end. Keys are handed over. It is cheaper for a reason.

We ship in containers. The car is strapped inside over its tyres, the doors are sealed, and nobody drives it again until we open the container in Canada. It is not exposed to salt spray on an open deck, it is not parked inches from a rental fleet, and there is no unrecorded mileage on the clock when it arrives.

The vessel itself is operated by a shipping line — SKORTA drives, and no trailer crosses an ocean. What matters is who is accountable for that leg. We book it, we choose the routing, we track the sailing and we chase it when a schedule moves. The line is confirmed per booking, as is the sailing window. Marine cover for the ocean leg would be arranged and confirmed at the same point, since terms differ by vessel and by declared value. You are not handed a booking reference and left to interpret a carrier's tracking page.

Winter, and why the calendar matters on this route

Canada imposes its own timetable. Between roughly November and March the risk on this route is not the ocean — it is everything on either side of it.

Inside a sealed container the car is dry and away from road salt for the whole crossing, which is the single strongest argument for containers on a winter booking. The exposure is at the ends. St Lawrence Seaway conditions restrict some routings in deep winter, which pushes traffic toward East Coast ports and lengthens the onward road distance to Ontario or Quebec addresses. Canadian ports run slower in ice and snow, and a day of terminal delay is normal rather than exceptional.

Then there is the delivery itself. A car on summer tyres, or a supercar with 30mm of ground clearance, cannot be delivered to a residential street in Muskoka in February in any sensible way — which is why we deliver enclosed, on a trailer, to the door, and why we will tell you honestly if the delivery address is better served in April.

• Ship in autumn if the car is going into storage for the winter anyway.
• Ship in spring if you want to drive it on arrival.
• If the date is fixed by a house move or a sale, we plan around the weather rather than pretend it is not there.

We build slack into the schedule instead of quoting a date we cannot control.

Arrival in Canada: we come to meet the car

This is the part most UK shippers do not do, and it is the reason people call us.

When the container reaches a Canadian port, a SKORTA crew travels out to receive it. We are there for the unstuff. We take the car out ourselves rather than watching a stevedore reverse it into daylight. We walk it against the photographic condition report signed in your driveway weeks earlier, in the same light, with the same person who took those photographs. Anything that has changed is documented on the spot, while there is still a container and a bill of lading to point at.

Then the car goes onto covered transport for the final road leg — port to Toronto, to Vancouver, to a farm outside Calgary, to a collection in Quebec — arranged and overseen by us, and specified on your booking before departure. It is delivered to the address and signed off with a second condition report. The customer signs at both ends, to the same person.

The alternative, which is the industry norm, is a broker chain: a UK forwarder, a shipping line, a Canadian customs agent, a domestic trucking company. Four contracts, four phone numbers, and every one of them able to blame the others. Our whole model is the opposite — one car, one crew, no depots and no sub-contracting, exactly as described on our single-car transport page.

Relocations and collector purchases

Two kinds of booking dominate this route, and they need different handling.

Relocations. You are moving to Canada and the car is going with you. The car is usually one of many things happening at once, which means the value we add is administrative as much as physical: a single collection date that fits around the house, storage in Britain if your Canadian address is not ready, and delivery timed to when you have actually landed rather than when a vessel happened to dock. Personal-import rules differ from commercial ones, and eligibility depends on the vehicle and the province, so the documentation list is confirmed for your specific car before anything is booked.

Collector purchases. A Canadian buyer has bought a car in Britain — often at auction, often unseen. Here the condition report is the product. The buyer's only honest record of what they paid for is the set of photographs taken before the doors closed, and the fact that the same person who took them hands the car over in Canada. We collect directly from the auction house or the vendor's premises, the way we do for auction and dealer movements, and the car never sits on a compound waiting for a shared load to fill.

For pre-1980 cars especially, the handling notes in our classic car guide apply from the first metre to the last.

Documents, declarations and what we will not guess at

An international road-and-sea movement generates a predictable paper trail. A CMR consignment note covers the international road elements. A UK export declaration covers the car leaving Britain. A bill of lading covers the ocean leg. At the Canadian end, import and admissibility documentation covers the car entering the country, together with proof of ownership and title history.

Where a car is going temporarily — a concours entry, a rally, a test programme — a carnet is the instrument commonly used for temporary import and re-export, and it changes both the paperwork and the timing. Say so at enquiry stage; it is much harder to fix afterwards.

What we will not do is quote you Canadian duty rates, tax percentages or admissibility outcomes from a web page. Those depend on the vehicle's age, its origin, its specification and the province it is entering, and they change. We confirm them for your car, in writing, before you commit — including the and any provincial requirements.

If the movement is in fact a European one — Switzerland, Portugal, anywhere our own crew can drive to — the structure is entirely different and simpler, and it is covered on our European transport page. For Canada, tell us the car, the two addresses and the month you want it there, and we will build the movement around them. Start with the estimate calculator for the UK leg, or call and describe the job.