How to transport cars and other vehicles across the ocean

Now that the American automotive industry is in serious trouble, more and more vehicles
come to the US from abroad. Quite significant amount of them is produced in Europe and
most of them come from Asia. Because of that, some may actually wonder how these vehicles
are brought to their destination in the first place. Not to mention special vehicles built for
customers like construction companies. Well, there are two ways you can bring them to the
US, or rather two methods.

The first method that is used is the traditional container shipping. Many of you have probably
seen scenes from the movies like “Lethal Weapon”, where there were cars inside big, cargo
containers. This is how it also looks like in the real life. Each of such containers holds one car
or another vehicle. Then, it is loaded onto the freighter with the help of one of many cranes
that are in ports. One by one, they are stacked in the ship's holds, as well as on some parts
of its deck. As you can imagine, such process lasts for many hours, especially when it is a
big, container ship. Therefore, the owner of the freighter have to rent the place at the port
for a very long time, which drastically increases the cost of the whole operation. The same
happens at the target port. After all, you will have to unload that cargo and keep it in the
port's warehouse. All of these things really increase the bill and, eventually, the total cost of
deliverance for the exporter.

Therefore, there were smart people who have noticed, that wheeled cargo can be dealt with
much easier. This is how the RORO method was created. In this case, RORO stands for “roll-
on, roll-off”. Why to pack a car into a container and lift it onto the ship, if you can simply roll
the car on the ship through a simple ramp. Therefore, vehicles are loaded straight into the
hold right on their places. This makes the whole process much more quicker, greatly reducing
the costs of the delivery. However, not only you have to have a specially designed ship, but
you are also restricted so as what type of cargo you can carry.

As you can see, international container shipping to North America is not that difficult at all. Even the
international shipping USA business operates in the same way. Therefore, we could even say
that the RORO method is what keeps our automotive industry alive, as RORO makes exporting
cars beneficial.