The car arrives, and TFX staff swarm, a half-dozen pair of eyes and hands working together to make sure the Porsche’s bodywork avoided any scrapes. They push into place a set of plastic Raceway ramps, then on top of those two slats to flatten the grade. The Porsche creeps backwards—the sills weren’t quite going to clear it. Then come another two slats. Hmm, still no-go. Two more. And two more. And two more.
Horodnyk has been working in the industry for more than 40 years; he singles out his part-ownership of a freight brokerage service called Traffix, starting in 1981, as a milestone. In 1986, one of that company’s sales staff asked if he would transport a car from Flint, Michigan to Toronto, offering him a fee much better than he was used to. Horodnyk shook on the deal, borrowing a friend’s trailer and hooking it to his personal Ford F-250 pickup, driving the 400 kilometres himself.
“My imitators” – this is how Horodnyk refers to his competitors – “are up the street, they’ll have one guy unloading a car. Say he brought it from Vancouver, 2,800 miles [4,500 km], to get it to his yard, only to scratch it on the last two feet,” he balks. “I don’t allow that. No, no. Let’s get out there. I don’t care if it’s 40 [degrees Celsius] below. You’re cold?going to be cold. If it was four hours for you to unload, it’s going to take all of us together 20 minutes.
Several years ago, for example, TFX found itself on the hook for the repair of the rear diffuser of an exotic supercar it’d delivered from the manufacturer to a dealership. “Now, I’m on the hunt for the answer: where did my process fail?” says Horodnyk. “About three months later, one of my drivers came to me and said, ‘I was training a guy yesterday [while transporting a car to that dealership] and as we were backing down the ramp, we found there’s a hole in it.
All the vehicle transport industry’s major revenue streams were disrupted. New-car auto shows around the world were cancelled; classic-car events were similarly shuttered. Many automakers temporarily idled their factories and stopped shipping to dealers. That April, TFX lost roughly 50 per cent of its business, and was forced to park 10 trucks and fire 10 drivers. “Everything stopped,” recalls Horodnyk. “We were bleeding money.