Where in the World is My Windshield? Transporting Auto Glass from Manufacturer to Retailer
By Abby Bowman
Every auto glass retailer across this country has one essential thing in common. Whether a national operation raking in tens of millions of dollars a year or a one-person shop serving a rural area, they all need auto glass delivered to them.
For that to happen, the glass has to be manufactured, fabricated and shipped, sometimes across vast swathes of land or sea to reach its final destination: an auto glass retailer’s shop. Most shop owners or managers are familiar with the last leg of the journey that brings the glass to their doors. But how many people in the retail portion of the auto glass industry think about the transportation involved in the rest of the process?
Windshields and backlites travel a journey of many twists and turns along the path from fabrication to installation.
First Stop
Intermodal railcars and over-the-road bottom drop trailers deliver raw materials like sand, limestone and soda ash to the glass manufacturing facility.
Second Stop
While at the manufacturing facility, the raw materials are turned into glass.
Third Stop
Then glass is shaped into a rough, unfinished version of a windshield.
Fourth Stop
Those unfinished windshields stay in a warehouse for a while before being loaded onto custom steel racks and shipped in fully loaded 53-foot dry vans to a “sister facility.”
Fifth Stop
At the sister facility, the raw windshields are finished and fully assembled. They’re then carefully packaged in wooden crates, custom corrugated boxes with foam, pallets or metal A-Frames.
Sixth Stop
The windshields are shipped to automotive OEM facilities, car dealerships, aftermarket customers, etc., in either full truckloads or less-than-truckload (LTL) shipments.
Seventh (And Final) Stop
Finished windshields are shipped to a retailer from the manufacturer’s inventory with LTL carriers. If everything went well, it only took about two weeks for the windshields delivered to the retailer to go from raw materials to their current state.
Fast, Reliable & Cheap: The Impossible Triangle
Glass is uniquely challenging to get from one place to another.
“Nobody wants to do it because it’s fragile,” says Jae Whang, the senior vice president of client strategy at LynnCo. LynnCo is a transportation logistics company based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
If glass gets broken in transit, it has to be counted as a loss. To avoid damage, glass has to be packaged, loaded and unloaded carefully.
Whang says smaller retailers arrange their own less-than-truckload (LTL) shipments. LTL shipping means there isn’t enough auto glass in one shipment to fill a truckload, so it gets shipped alongside other items.
Whang says this is a great way to save money, but it comes with problems.
“With that, your glass windshield is on the same truck as a pallet of stones, a lawn mower and a gas tank,” Whang says.
He adds that it’s vital for anyone shipping auto glass to investigate which carriers are the most successful at moving glass. They must have a good record of picking up and delivering on time and a low claim rate for damaged glass. They also need to secure the glass to handle jostling properly.
Whang also cautions those shipping auto glass to remember that they can’t have everything.
“You can have it fast, and you can have it reliable, but you’re not going to get it cheap,” he says.
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