Ship a car from New York to Florida

Plenty of New Yorkers own a car they barely drive in the city and can't live without in Florida. Some are heading to a winter place in Boca Raton, Delray Beach or Fort Lauderdale. Others are leaving for good and would rather spend moving week packing than covering a thousand miles of I-95 with a full trunk. Whichever it is, shipping the car turns a two-day drive into a two-and-a-half-hour flight.

Expect roughly 940 miles from Midtown to Jacksonville and about 1,300 to Miami, a bit more from eastern Long Island or the Hudson Valley. Florida itself is long: Jacksonville to Miami alone is about 350 miles, so the delivery address changes the trip as much as the pickup does.

This lane is I-95 nearly end to end. A carrier leaving the city typically crosses into New Jersey by the George Washington Bridge or from Staten Island, takes the Turnpike south to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, works around Baltimore and the Capital Beltway, then runs through Richmond, the Carolinas and Savannah before entering Florida at Jacksonville.

• Atlantic coast deliveries (Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Daytona, Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami) sit directly on the corridor, so they are the most natural drops for these trucks.
• Orlando is a short hop west on I-4 from Daytona Beach.
• The Gulf Coast (Tampa, Sarasota and Naples) is a detour from I-95, so cars headed there often ride a truck that already has west-coast stops.

The slow spots are well known: the Cross Bronx, the Turnpike near Newark, the Beltway and the stretch of I-95 around Fredericksburg, Virginia. Drivers plan their federal hours around them, and that is a big part of why we give transit as a range.

Southbound demand from the New York area climbs from mid-October and stays high until the week before Christmas, with a spike around Thanksgiving. The return wave runs from April into May, after Passover and Easter. If you're coming back in spring, book the Florida to New York leg early; it fills as fast as the fall run south. Summer is the quiet season southbound, which is good news if you are relocating rather than wintering.

For a pickup in November, reach out two to four weeks ahead and give us a few days of flexibility. If your date truly can't move, expedited car shipping puts your car at the top of a carrier's list. It costs more, and it shortens the wait for pickup rather than the drive itself.

The default here is open car transport, the same multi-car carriers dealers use. For a commuter car or the family SUV, it is the practical choice, and it gives you the most trucks to choose from. In December the northern half of I-95 is salted, so plan a wash in Florida.

A car that has lived in a Manhattan garage for years, a weekend car from the Hamptons, or anything with low ground clearance is a better fit for enclosed transport. Enclosed trucks are fewer, so give yourself more lead time.

New York is the hardest pickup city on the East Coast for a full-size car carrier, and planning around that is most of the job. Trucks are restricted to designated truck routes except for their final approach, and every parkway in the region (the Belt, the Grand Central, the Hutch, the Saw Mill, the Taconic, the Northern and Southern State) bans commercial vehicles outright. Our New York City car shipping guide goes borough by borough; here's the short version for a Florida-bound car.

• Manhattan. Many full-size carriers won't go onto the island at all. The usual answers are a meeting point near a highway in the Bronx, Queens or across the river in New Jersey, or a smaller two- or three-car truck for the first leg where one is available.
• Garages. A carrier can't enter a parking garage. Bring the car out yourself and drive it to the agreed spot.
• Street parking. If the car lives on the street, check your alternate-side schedule for pickup day. The driver can't wait for a spot, and a ticket on the windshield at pickup is a bad start.
• Brooklyn and Queens. Brownstone blocks are tight and often double-parked. A wide avenue or a big-box store lot near the BQE or the Long Island Expressway usually works.
• Staten Island is the easiest borough, close to the Goethals and Outerbridge crossings.
• Long Island pickups come off the LIE, and most of Nassau and Suffolk is straightforward. Westchester and the Hudson Valley are reached by I-87, I-287 and I-684.

Take your E-ZPass tag out of the car before pickup so it doesn't register tolls on the trip south.

South Florida gets more New York cars than anywhere else on this lane. Delivery there often means a condo tower with a tight drop-off loop or a 55+ community in Boca Raton or Delray Beach with a gatehouse. In both cases the driver unloads on the street or at a lot nearby, and you drive the last stretch. Our local guides for Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Orlando cover the details.

Tell your building or HOA the delivery window in advance, and make sure someone is there in daylight to compare the car with the pickup report and note anything new before they sign.