Can I store a car in a container long term?

The steel handles the outside. You handle the inside.

A shipping container is a better car cover than anything short of a garage. Nothing lands on the roof, nothing bleaches the paint, and nobody walking past can see there is a car in there at all. The walls are 14-gauge weathering steel and the cargo doors close onto gaskets built for ocean crossings. Hail season stops being something you think about.

What the box does not do is manage the air inside it. There is no heat, no fan and no dehumidifier unless you put them there. Shut a car into a steel room in August and you have shut in every bit of humidity that was in the air that afternoon, plus whatever is still evaporating out of the carpet.

Theft, weather and sun are solved the day the box lands. Almost everything that goes wrong with long term vehicle storage after that traces back to moisture, and moisture is the part you set up in advance rather than fix later.

How long it sits changes what you have to do

A car put away in November and pulled out in April is a different job from a car that sits four years while somebody is deployed or a project stalls. Over one season, a dry pad, a vent or two and a battery tender will carry it.

Past a year the small things start to add up. Fuel goes stale. Rotors surface rust where the pads sit against them. Tires take a flat spot if nothing ever rolls. Rodents go looking for somewhere warm to nest and a stationary engine bay is exactly the shape they want.

• One season: dry gravel, vents, fuel topped off, battery on a tender or out of the car.
• One to three years: add moisture absorbers, fuel stabilizer, and open the doors to look at it every couple of months.
• Longer than that: jack stands under it, plugs in the exhaust and intake, and treat it as a stored asset rather than a parked car.

Get the car ready before the doors shut

Most of the damage people blame on the container went in with the car. A vehicle loaded wet, or washed the evening before, or with a floor mat that never quite dried, is a humidifier running inside a sealed box.

1. Wash it, then let it dry outdoors in the sun for a full day. Wheel wells and door jambs hold water long after the paint looks dry.
2. Dry the interior and pull everything organic out of it. Wrappers, a gym bag, damp mats, the half bag of dog food in the trunk.
3. Wax or seal the paint while it is still outside. That is a much easier job in daylight than in a dark box.
4. Disconnect the battery or set it up on a tender, and decide before delivery day whether you want power in the container at all.

Then think about what the box is standing on. Gravel that drains beats the low corner of the yard where water stands for two days after a storm. Ground moisture comes up through a container floor and into whatever is sitting on it, and no amount of prep on the car fixes a wet spot underneath.

Which size, and what the extra room actually buys

A 20 ft container is about 160 square feet of floor and roughly 1,170 cubic feet. A car fits. What a 20 ft does not give you is room to walk around the car, and that turns out to matter more than people expect the first time they go to check on it.

A 40 ft is about 320 square feet and about 2,390 cubic feet. That is the car, a working aisle down one side, the spare tires, the parts and the shelf of boxes that came out of the garage when you cleared space. It rents at $235 a month against $165 for the 20 ft, and it sells at around $4,900 against $3,200 delivered.

Do not size it off a chart. Interior width sits under the 8 ft exterior and the door opening varies from one box to the next, so measure your vehicle against the figures stencilled on that container's own door beside the CSC plate.

Where the box sits decides how dry it stays

Two containers on the same farm can behave completely differently. One is on a crowned gravel pad out in the open. The other is on clay in a hollow where fog sits until ten in the morning. The second one sweats every clear night and the first one mostly does not.

Blocks under the corner castings hold the frame off the dirt and let air move underneath. Doors pointed away from the prevailing wind means less weather at the seal every time you open up. Shade helps in July and costs you nothing in January.

We set the container level on blocks at delivery, and delivery and leveling are free inside 75 road miles of the Woodlawn yard. Send a photo of the spot and we will tell you straight whether the truck can get to it. A 20 ft drop needs about 65 feet of straight pull-in for the truck and tilt-bed, a 40 ft about 95.