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Vert-A-Pack is a phrase that doesn’t get enough credit. There are a number of reasons why you haven’t heard of it, but it changed car shipping forever.

Back in the 70’s Chevy was trying to figure out a way to ship cars more effectively. While the traditional methods would work so long as production was lower, higher productions vehicles such as the doomed Chevy Vega would need to get to showrooms and auto sellers at a quicker pace.

The traditional route would be able to ship 12-18 cars depending on the size of the vehicle. The price of shipping vehicles is high. The company decided to revolutionize how cars are shipped via railways.

The traditional methods such as utilizing truck transports and open car carriers left a lot of cars under the threat of thievery and damage. It was up to the engineers at Chevy and GM to develop a safer, more effective and cost-efficient way to get cars to the dealerships.

Vert-A-Pack Becomes The New Standard

Where the traditional method was able to ship up to 18 cars (for compact cars) the new method could ship up to 24. The process was also an absolute shift. Instead of loading the vehicles on and having them stationary, the new methods introduce shipping the vehicles from the nose-down.

Now, many people would look at this and say that it might not be good for the cars to sit nose-down for long periods of time, and for the most part, they would be right, but then again, cars are durable – especially during the 70’s.

While the debut of these shipping methods were in dawning at the same time as the Vega, the car did not live up to the hype and quickly became known as one of the worst cars in history. Still, the methods used to ship reshaped auto shipping for years to come.