I am leaning towards driving it although a very large part of that trip will be rather boring (read midwest).
Anyway, in terms of research on moving companies in case others have a need later...
The auto transport industry is like the moving industry, unregulated, too many brokers using the same transport companies with arbitrary pricing, lack of any quality standards and serious ethical and business issues with many of them.
Nevertheless, like with U-Haul, if you are lucky everything goes fine or if you aren't so lucky then you land up in a mess. No guarantees. Since people don't use these services often, each company has good reports and some have bad reports (based on typically a single experience) but on the aggregate, they have almost all collected enough customer dissatisfaction to worry about.
Only one company seems to stand out over the rest and that is IntercityLines that I have not been able to find a single bad report about. The downside is that they are almost twice as expensive as every one else. But all their transports are all covered (as opposed to the open stacked transports others use as the default), they load and unload horizontally, they cover seats, insides and outsides with dust-proof material, etc. Basically a premier white-gloves service for the money and seem to be popular with owners of antique cars, high-end cars, race cars, etc.
Coast-coast is about $1800.
The problem with all of these companies including the above is that they never guarantee any pick up or delivery dates and they need to be scheduled far in advance for a window at either end.
I have no relationship with the IntercityLines company nor have I ever used them. But if I were to decide to ship it that would be the only company I have confidence in to try.
] Now if you had finished your plane, that trip at 3,000 to 6,000 feet would be a whole different story.[
