Carrier trailers have fixed length limits depending on type:
The shorter your vehicle, the more cars a carrier can fit on a single load — which lowers the cost per vehicle. Compact cars and sedans are the cheapest to ship for this reason. Longer vehicles like full-size pickup trucks and large SUVs take up more trailer space and are priced accordingly.
Federal law caps gross vehicle weight at 80,000 lbs for trucks on public highways. After accounting for the truck and trailer themselves, that leaves roughly 35,000 lbs available for the cars being transported — and individual states may impose stricter per-axle limits on top of that.
This matters most for heavy electric vehicles. A typical mid-size EV weighs around 4,500 lbs, so a full load of nine EVs would exceed the weight limit before the trailer is even full by length. Carriers price heavy vehicles higher because they displace other cargo and reduce load efficiency.
Note on weigh stations: Weigh stations are typically closed on Sundays, which can affect scheduling and pricing for weight-sensitive loads on certain days of the week.
The legal height limit for most highway travel is 14 ft. Standard two-deck trailers can stack smaller vehicles, but tall vehicles — large pickup trucks, cargo vans, lifted SUVs — prevent anything from being loaded above them, effectively using two deck slots.
Height also varies across different sections of the trailer: the lower deck sits closer to the ground near the belly and rises over the axles and fifth-wheel area, creating pockets of different clearance.
Hotshot carriers use a single deck and are less constrained by height limits, making them a natural fit for tall vehicles. However, hotshots operate most economically on shorter routes. The result:
Standard trailers are limited to 102 inches (8.5 ft) in width. Side rails and frame supports on two-deck trailers take several inches off that usable space, which means vehicles with rear dual wheels (duallies) often cannot be loaded in standard side positions.
Wide vehicles — dually pickups — typically need to be placed in a tail position on a standard trailer, or transported by a hotshot with an open deck and no side frame. Similar to tall vehicles, this creates the same distance-based pricing pattern:
All of the above applies most strongly on balanced lanes — routes where demand flows roughly equally in both directions — and on the head haul (the high-demand direction) of imbalanced lanes. On the back haul of imbalanced lanes, the rules change.
When a lane has strong directional imbalance — for example, cars flowing from the Midwest to Florida heading south before winter — carriers frequently return north with partial loads. On these back-haul runs, carriers prefer any revenue over none. Empty deck space that would otherwise go to waste makes weight and size constraints far less relevant: the carrier has capacity to spare regardless of how heavy or large your vehicle is.
In practice, this means that on high-imbalance back-haul routes:
This is one reason why the same vehicle can cost noticeably different amounts to ship depending on which direction you're going and the time of year — even on the same route.
| Attribute | Limit | Pricing Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Length | 53–75 ft trailer | Longer cars = fewer fit per load = higher price |
| Weight | ~35,000 lbs cargo | Heavier cars displace others = higher price (especially EVs) |
| Height | 14 ft road limit | Tall vehicles = hotshot only on long haul = higher price long distance |
| Width | 102 inches | Wide vehicles (duallies, vans) = restricted loading = higher price long distance |