Press releases

ROCHESTER, MICHIGAN and NEW YORK – January 24, 2023 –Auto Hauler Exchange today announced the launch of its new online marketplace that transforms the way shippers and carriers connect with one another. The first digital marketplace of its kind in the vehicle logistics industry, the new Auto Hauler Exchange (AHX) connects rigorously vetted large and small vehicle haulers across the United States and Canada directly with vehicle shippers. By eliminating the middleman typically required in vehicle logistics, AHX streamlines the shipping process, cuts shipping delays, and reduces empty space on carriers and unnecessary miles while increasing revenue.

AHX is an easy-to-use, online portal for vehicle logistics, offering both transparency and improved profit margins for shippers and carriers. As the middleman is no longer necessary for shipping logistics with AHX, an entire layer of costs is eliminated; shipping fees are lower with no middleman markup and carriers see higher profitability with shipper direct pricing for both single and full truck loads.

“Vehicle logistics processes are very dated and fragmented. This has impacted the entire vehicle supply chain with a considerable loss of vehicle carriers actively hauling. The Auto Hauler Exchange online marketplace is a transformative option to remedy this situation. The exchange provides a digital ecosystem where shippers and haulers can work together,” says Royce Neubauer, founder and CEO of Auto Hauler Exchange. “We enable shippers to market their opportunities directly to carriers, so there is no middleman pulling revenue away from the transaction. We also enable carriers to embrace opportunities directly from large scale shippers that they would not normally see.”

Vehicle remarketers, dealers, fleets, rental car companies, auctions, and manufacturers can now expand their buying and selling reach by leveraging the nationwide carrier partnerships within AHX. They can also trust that the carriers that are moving their vehicles are vetted and have the correct authority, insurance, and safety ratings to do the work.

Carriers on the exchange can now move vehicles for large scale shippers they would not previously have had the opportunity to work for. They can pick and choose which opportunities fit their routing on a day-by-day basis to maximize their capacity and eliminate empty miles, while allowing them to plan their backhauls in advance. Also, AHX pays the carrier on their terms, enabling them to receive payments in as little as 48 hours after all documents have been uploaded into the system.

Automation capabilities within the exchange enables shippers to instantly track their deliveries through the integrated Transportation Management System (TMS) at any time by mobile phone, tablet, or desktop. When circumstances require immediate changes to be made, shippers and carriers also have the option to call each other directly for rapid coordination. Dashboards, email, messaging, alerts, and notifications are all built into the exchange platform to further streamline operations, providing digitized operations that require less manpower.

“In essence, we are replacing the middleman and digitizing tedious and time consuming manual operations with sophisticated technology that we customized for vehicle transportation in partnership with our marketplace platform provider, “Nautical Commerce,” says Neubauer. “We have automated the complex workflows of the vehicle logistics ecosystem seamlessly on the robust Nautical platform, enabling the exchange to provide a frictionless experience that is easy to learn and use. During beta testing of the new exchange,  AHX moved vehicles for over 20 dealership groups and remarketers throughout the US and signed up approximately 200 carriers with over 700 assets. These numbers are growing rapidly with the launch and we are excited about our trajectory.”

“Royce and the Auto Hauler Exchange team are visionaries in an industry that has traditionally been resistant to change. By reinforcing the relational pieces of their business and digitizing the low value transactional aspects, Auto Hauler Exchange can better serve their customers — both shippers and carriers,” says Ryan Lee, Founder & CEO of Nautical Commerce. “Nautical is proud to be the technology partner powering the next-generation of logistics brokerage.”

Suburban Ford of Troy, Michigan transports as many as 50 vehicles a month from auction houses to their car lot, and the number is growing. Used car manager Terry Lange, has worked with many different shipping companies, but now will only ship with the Auto Hauler Exchange.

“With the Auto Hauler Exchange, I’ve been able to get the cars from the auction with a one- to two-day turnaround at a fraction of the cost per unit that the auction house would charge. I see as much as a 30 percent savings. Previously it could have taken as long as two weeks for the auction house to arrange shipping,” Lange says. “The Auto Hauler Exchange has been nothing but exceptional – the best turnaround time, savings per unit, transparency of rates and terms, and customer service.”

About Auto Hauler Exchange

Auto Hauler Exchange is a vehicle logistics online marketplace and community that enables shippers and carriers to connect directly to eliminate empty miles driven while maximizing capacity. The exchange gives control back to carriers, empowering them to fill their trucks by connecting them directly to shippers and cutting out the middleman. By using technology, AHX creates a frictionless, efficient environment for vehicle transportation. For additional information, visit autohaulerexchange.com

About Nautical Commerce

Nautical is a multi-vendor ecommerce platform enabling B2B businesses to own their industry by leveraging the marketplace model. Using Nautical’s headless technology, businesses can easily embrace and extend their existing infrastructure to grow beyond their inventory, become a platform for their industry, consolidate multi-brand businesses, and more. To learn more about how Nautical can help grow your business, visit www.nauticalcommerce.com

###

Media Contact:

Kari Wise

Boulevard Public Relations

kari@boulevardpr.com

Digital marketplaces are rewriting industry rulebooks, building new B2B relationships and modernizing historical processes.

This is paradoxically most true, and most impactful, in those industries most resistant to change. So says Royce Neubauer, founder and CEO of Auto Hauler Exchange, whose company’s online marketplace platform is making vehicle hauling faster, easier and more profitable for both shippers and carriers.

“We’ve been in vehicle logistics for a few years now, and throughout that time I’ve seen a lot of fragmentation and inefficiencies on how shippers and carriers are sourcing each other — it’s almost like one hand doesn’t know the other hand exists at times,” he told PYMNTS in a recent conversation.

The first digital marketplace of its kind in the vehicle logistics industry, Auto Hauler Exchange automates the complex workflows of the vehicle logistics ecosystem by connecting large and small vehicle haulers directly with vehicle shippers, eliminating the middleman and breaking down historical industry silos that commonly led to carriers driving so-called “empty miles” with empty space on their trucks.

“I just never could understand why that trailer wasn’t full,” Neubauer said. “But a lot of shippers work with a small pod of large carriers, and the problem is there are too many opportunities for a lot of these carriers to actually handle — while at the same time, you have tens of thousands of carriers out there desperately looking for these opportunities.”

A Needed Update

Auto Hauler Exchange is focused on digitizing the carrier and shipper experience to allow business on both sides of the engagement to operate using what Neubauer called, “the most efficient and optimized system in the vehicle logistics space.”

“Vehicle logistics processes are very dated and fragmented,” he said, “so we did our research, we discovered what issues shippers were dealing with, what issues auto haulers were dealing with. And the feedback was interesting because they were both dealing with the same issues. Things were fragmented, things were disjointed, the businesses couldn’t connect together.”

PYMNTS has previously covered how aging systems can turn key B2B interactions into major headaches, and how next generation software tools and other technological advances are increasingly being leaned on for seamless vendor engagements across industries.

“At the end of the day, we’re taking a lot of the administrative tasks out of the [B2B] process and eliminating some wasteful human touches that we can digitize,” Neubauer said. “You know, we’re going to procure the carriers digitally, we’re going to pay the carriers digitally, and people are going to get one bill at the end of the week because we’re allowing them to just deal with one vendor partner.”

Auto Hauler Exchange pays businesses using the platform on their own terms, enabling them to receive payments in as little as 48 hours after all documents have been uploaded into the system.

Digitized operations that require less manpower are all built into the exchange’s platform, helping streamline operations with automation capabilities that allow shippers to instantly track their deliveries in real time through the integrated Transportation Management System (TMS). For their part, carriers can pick and choose which opportunities fit their routing on a day-by-day basis to maximize capacity and eliminate empty miles, while simultaneously allowing them to plan their backhauls in advance.

“We enable shippers to market their opportunities directly to carriers, and we also enable carriers to embrace opportunities directly from large-scale shippers that they would not normally see,” the CEO said. “Shipping fees are lower with no middleman markup, and carriers see higher profitability with shipper direct pricing for both single and full truck loads.”

Auto Hauler Exchange is not trying to eliminate any existing partnerships, Neubauer emphasized. Instead, he sees the new digital marketplace as a value-add for those shippers that have additional opportunities.

By the Industry, for the Industry

“Our biggest mission in this is allowing the carrier more opportunities to maximize their capacity, to create route optimization, and to try to attract more drivers back to an industry that I think is the most specialized in all of supply chain,” Neubauer said. “You know, this space is going to be one of the last to go autonomous, and we’re going to need more drivers down the line than we have today. So we’re trying to build an ecosystem that attracts and supports that.”

He adds that the industry overall is a space that’s ripe for technology growth.

“You’re hearing more and more conversation about building efficiencies through technology, building transparency through technology, creating ecosystems that allow carrier and shipper to operate much more collaboratively. The Auto Hauler Exchange hopes to be at the forefront of that growth,” Neubauer said.

As for his biggest challenge so far in launching the marketplace?

“Technology is hard to build,” Neubauer told PYMNTS. “Truly creating a digitized, efficient product where we bring together multiple partners, multiple layers of technology, it has been a learning curve — but it’s also been one of the coolest parts of this journey, seeing that collaborative process come together to build something that we feel is going to be an industry changer and socializing the ‘why’ behind it, to great feedback. It’s all been very rewarding.”

Auto Hauler Exchange (AHX) has launched an online B2B marketplace for the vehicle logistics industry.

The digital marketplace connects vehicle haulers across the United States and Canada with vehicle shippers like remarketers, dealers, fleets, rental car companies, auctions and manufacturers, AHX said in a Tuesday (Jan. 24) press release.

“We enable shippers to market their opportunities directly to carriers, so there is no middleman pulling revenue away from the transaction,” AHX founder and CEO Royce Neubauer said in the release. “We also enable carriers to embrace opportunities directly from large scale shippers that they would not normally see.”

The vehicle transport industry has typically had brokers as middlemen, but that model has had limitations because shippers can only know so many brokers, and brokers can only know so many transporters, RunBuggy Vice President Finance Jacob Patterson told PYMNTS in an interview posted in June.

A digital marketplace, on the other hand, can allow shippers and transporters to communicate directly and instantaneously throughout the process, Patterson said at the time.

Digital solutions can also help vehicle transporters fill more of the spots available on their trailers, lowering the per-vehicle costs for both the carrier and the shipper, Autosled founder and Chief Revenue Officer Dave Sperau told PYMNTS in an interview posted in April.

The average truck hauling anything from cars to groceries to retail goods is 35% empty, Sperau said.

The new AHX digital marketplace vets the haulers to make sure they have the correct authority, insurance and safety ratings, streamlines the shipping process, reduces empty space on carriers and cuts down on unnecessary miles by allowing carriers to select the opportunities that fit their routing, according to the press release.

The exchange enables tracking of deliveries, communication between shippers and carriers and notifications. Plus, carriers get paid by AHX as soon as 48 hours after uploading documents into the system, the release said.

“Vehicle logistics processes are very dated and fragmented,” Neubauer said in the release. “This has impacted the entire vehicle supply chain with a considerable loss of vehicle carriers actively hauling. The Auto Hauler Exchange online marketplace is a transformative option to remedy this situation.”