A classic voyage was from Emden to San Fransisco with cars and back to Rotterdam with grain. As the car market developed in 1970's, specialised car carrier ships were designed and built for the market. They had multiple decks with high cubic capacity to dwt ratio, speeds around 20 knots, roll on roll off facilities, and inner decks and ramps [Stopford, Maritime Economics]. Nowadays the worldwide car and vehicle carrier fleet has ships of capacity from 500 vehicle units to 6500-7000 vehicle units. The ships are more specialised and advanced in order to respond to the market's demands. .
The car carrying routes were more precise before 2000. It was basically from Japan and Korea to Europe and America and with a smaller volume, from Europe to America. Nowadays a fragmentation is observed within the market. This fragmentation is reasoned by vehicle production relocating from traditional sources. As a figure, in 1980's, 40% of vehicle shipments worldwide was from Japan to USA. Now this value has decreased to 20% [Seatrade, 2003]. This value was even higher before 1980's and nearly 80% of all finished vehicles were transported from Japan, creating a tendency for car carriers to focus on Japan. Competition from especially other Asian manufactuers such as Daewoo, Kia and Hyundai from Korea and Proton from Malaysia has taken from Japan's market share in the recent years. Over the past couple of years, new countries are being mentioned within the market starting with Thailand where the vehicle production is expected to reach 1.2 million units by 2008. South Africa is among the newcomers of the list where the current 130,000 export units are expected to be doubled within five years. Brasil, Mexico and China are the other countries mentioned with increasing market shares [Seatrade 2003]. If we divide the countries of the market as developed and developing, we see USA, Western European Countries, Japan and Australia in the developed group.