Catastrophic Damage at 2026 D3WR - any suggestions on transporters to ship an F3 home to NC?

BajaRon said:

I am sure there are good techs out there with integrity, though I also know dealerships put pressure on them in some cases, as 'Time is Money'! I just wish everyone had the high standards I expect. In my opinion, a high standard should BE the standard. But you can wish in one hand and... well, you know the drill.

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Oh that I know the drill. I also know that getting things done on the cheap by people with neither the skills, the experience, nor the equipment rarely turns out well. I'm sure you see the result of a lot of that coming through your shop, after the damage is done. People don't budget properly for tires and servicing. It's the total cost of ownership, not just the out the door price that counts!

I've learned that you have to build a relationship with a service shop to become trusting of their diagnosis and repairs. The high standard should BE the standard and the level of trust should be implicit just by having the manufacturers Logo on the building. Unfortunately...

This post reminds me of the old saying, "experienced mechanics aren't cheap, and cheap mechanics aren't experienced!"

My local dealer is horrible at keeping techs. Turnover is sky high. I never see the same face more than twice in the service dept. Because of that, the techs are always learning on your bike. I had a punctured rear tire replaced there not long after I bought the bike, and they messed up the belt alignment while doing it. Took it in the next day to correct it, and it took them over 5 and a half hours to complete! It was so bad, the dealership manager got involved directly and ended up giving me a $250 gift card for compensation. Still, I just do not want that shop to touch my bike again, ever! I wouldn't trust them to do anything other than charge me for the service, and that's why I chose to take my chances and not have the 3k service done. I do the oil changes myself and it's easy enough to torque the lug nuts to make sure they don't fall off. At 8k miles, so far, so good. If it blows up, they make new bikes every day.

If you still want to have it shipped home, I have used Haulbikes.com for shipping from NC to Wisconsin. Reasonable price and specialized motorcycle shippers. Right now may be a good time, as they are hauling bikes to Sturgis. You might get a good deal during this time.

I was talking to KK today. I have put in another request for a quote for shipping. The way it seems most of them work is that you request the locations and they come up with some ungodly price. Then they email you back with lower and lower prices as it goes out for bid. I spoke with him and we kinda established a threshold as to what was acceptable shipping vs going to pick it up. I told him to keep in mind that it's about a 3600 mile round trip. At 20 mpg, thats 180 gallons of gas at $4 per gallon, so $700 in gas. If you add in hotel at about $125 per night, you are at about $950 for the trip and approx. 3 days with 2 people. Once he talks with his daughter, we will be looking at all the situations and see what works best. As JayBros said, thanks for all the suggestions, as this is quite the pickle.
He has talked about a Canyon, and as I mentioned to him, it could be worth a trade in (at a significant loss), but you really don't want to deal with a dealership that knows (or at least thinks), they have you over a barrel. Sometimes you will find one that will help you out, but not always. Most of them will give about the same price for his trade in (broken or fixed), but the cost of the new one is where they will sometimes get you.
Thanks again for helping out my buddy.

blacklightning said:

I was talking to KK today. I have put in another request for a quote for shipping. The way it seems most of them work is that you request the locations and they come up with some ungodly price. Then they email you back with lower and lower prices as it goes out for bid. I spoke with him and we kinda established a threshold as to what was acceptable shipping vs going to pick it up. I told him to keep in mind that it's about a 3600 mile round trip. At 20 mpg, thats 180 gallons of gas at $4 per gallon, so $700 in gas. If you add in hotel at about $125 per night, you are at about $950 for the trip and approx. 3 days with 2 people. Once he talks with his daughter, we will be looking at all the situations and see what works best. As JayBros said, thanks for all the suggestions, as this is quite the pickle.
He has talked about a Canyon, and as I mentioned to him, it could be worth a trade in (at a significant loss), but you really don't want to deal with a dealership that knows (or at least thinks), they have you over a barrel. Sometimes you will find one that will help you out, but not always. Most of them will give about the same price for his trade in (broken or fixed), but the cost of the new one is where they will sometimes get you.
Thanks again for helping out my buddy.

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That’s a bit of a problem with the shipping industry. Unless you pay a set price for on particular company to do the work themselves, they put it out to bid.

In the end you get the lowest price bidder and you have little idea or control over how they treat your vehicle. It may end up being a compound route where it gets transferred between vehicles by people who don’t know how a Spyder works.

How much you pay for a particular Can Am trike often depends on your dealer’s location. Where I am, Spyder’s go for MSRP, no discounting. That’s because they sell out their season’s allocation fairly quickly. Canyons and Rykers they have leftover prior year’s models still. They are discounted quite heavily.

In large metro markets the Rykers prove to be far more popular it seems and the situation regarding popularity is reversed. I thought Canyons would be very popular out here where side by sides and adventure bikes are immensely popular, but it seems not for some reason. I think it’s because off road here is a bit extreme even for a Canyon.

So dealers are going to operate within the parameters of their market. Part of the problem is that it seems Can Am forces a model mix on their dealers that doesn’t match their market requirements so some models just sit, which means that dealers won’t budge on the price of their most popular models in order to retain some kind of overall profit margin. You can’t always blame the dealer as pricing is forced upon them by their local market tastes and the need to retain a profit in a very difficult trading environment what with the current interest rates and state of the economy for retirees.

JayBros said:

That's exactly what I faced when I bought my Spyder intentionally at the end of MY 2014. The dealership less than 4 miles from my house with an excellenty service department wouldn't shave one thin dime off MSRP on the Spyder I wanted so I went 90+ miles to work with a deaership that wanted to clear floor space for new bikes and saved a big bunch of bucks.

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Unfortunately for me, the nearest dealers beyond those couple near me, are a long days ride there, an overnight stay, and a long days ride back. Even then, those dealers are experiencing the same model mixes as locally so their pricing seems to be similar. It would be a two or three days ride to get somewhere like that. I’m in that half of the country where only 15% of the population lives.

By the time you factor that cost of travel, plus building a relationship with my local dealer, makes the potential discounts less attractive.

Of course, trading conditions are very different now in 2026 than 2014. Post Covid things are still kind of weird and often counter intuitive to what you would expect. Plus, the places giving large discounts wanted to give me significantly less for my trade.

We live in strange times.