Optimising car transport through smarter bundling

How might we optimise car bundling to transport more vehicles with fewer trucks and trips?

Inform

When individual orders limit efficient transport

Inbound and outbound shipments account for more than half of overall logistics costs for many businesses. As supply volumes grow and organisations expand into new locations and markets, transport costs are expected to rise even further. In the existing process, cars were ordered in response to individual dealer requests, without preliminary transport planning. This left little room to combine vehicles efficiently. Even when cars shared the same transport date, origin and destination, an average of just two cars could be transported on a single truck.

Analyse

Finding more opportunities to bundle cars

We tested whether intermediate stops could create more opportunities to combine vehicles and make better use of available transport capacity. This led to Air not Moved, Mile not Driven, a prototype that added pick-up and delivery stops along each route. By combining more cars within a single journey, fewer trucks and trips were needed. Filling an entire trailer also offered a cost advantage over booking individual spaces, creating another way to reduce transport costs.

Activate

Turning smarter bundling into measurable savings

The advanced bundling system turned these combinations into complete truckload schedules for both third-party transport providers and the automotive retailer’s own vehicles. By bringing more cars together within each transport plan, the system increased the number of vehicles bundled by 87%. This translated into between €420,000 and €720,000 in additional annual savings, while creating a basis for handling more complex and dynamic transport scenarios in the future.