Car & Vehicle Towing

There's no single price for towing a car, and anyone who quotes you one without asking questions is guessing. Two things drive the cost: how far the vehicle is going, and how hard it is to get onto the truck.

What you should expect is a firm number before anything moves. Both postcodes, the make and model, and whether the wheels still turn is usually enough to price it properly on the call. There's a fuller breakdown of how a recovery is priced, and what pushes a quote up, on our recovery and towing prices page.

Whether a car can be towed with its wheels on the road depends almost entirely on what's driving them.

Towing an automatic car with its driven wheels turning is the classic way to destroy a gearbox. An automatic circulates its oil with a pump driven by the engine, so with the engine off and the wheels turning the internals are spinning dry. A few miles can be enough to do real damage, and it is an expensive lesson. On a flatbed the problem disappears — all four wheels are off the ground, so an automatic tows no differently from a manual.

Four-wheel drive is the same story for a different reason. Permanent systems link the axles through a centre differential that was never designed to run with one pair of wheels stopped and the other spinning, and getting it wrong can cook a transfer case.

Electric cars go on the bed, without exception. The motors on a driven axle act as generators when the wheels turn, pushing current back into a system that is switched off and not expecting it.

Most of the towing damage we see wasn't caused by a recovery firm. It was caused by someone with a rope and good intentions.

Towing a car on a rope or strap is legal on ordinary roads in the UK, but the rules are tighter than most people assume. The gap between the two vehicles must not exceed 4.5 metres, and if it is more than 1.5 metres the rope has to be made clearly visible from both sides. The car on the back needs a driver at the wheel with the steering unlocked and the brakes working. A motorway is not the place for any of it beyond getting a broken-down vehicle clear at the next exit.

Then there's the part the regulations don't cover. With the engine off there's no power steering and no servo assistance on the brakes, so the car steers heavily and stops far later than the driver expects. Add a rope that snatches every time the vehicle in front lifts off, and a short tow home becomes a shunt in slow traffic.

A-frames are worth avoiding too unless you genuinely know what you're doing. Used wrongly they put the same load through the gearbox as a rope tow, with the added question of whether the combination now counts as a trailer. If the car doesn't have to move today, waiting for a truck is cheaper than explaining a bent bumper to your insurer.

Search for a towing company near me and you'll get two kinds of result. They behave very differently.

The first is a national operator or a lead-generation site. You ring, they take your details, and the job goes out to whichever local firm picks it up. You don't choose who turns up, the price has a middleman's margin built into it, and if something goes wrong you're talking to a switchboard rather than the person who did the work.

The second is a local towing company doing its own jobs, which is what we are. We answer our own phone and drive our own truck, and the person you speak to at nine in the morning is the same one you'll get at nine at night.

Three things are worth checking before you book anyone. Are they insured for your vehicle while it's on their truck, not just for the truck itself? Will they commit to a price before setting off? And will they tell you who is coming and roughly when? A firm that's cagey about all three is a firm planning to renegotiate once your car is already loaded.

Not everyone searching for towing wants a truck. A fair number have just come back to an empty parking space.

If your car has been removed by the police, the local authority or a private landowner, we can't get it back for you and neither can any other recovery firm. It will have gone to a designated pound, and only the organisation that took it can release it — usually once you've paid a removal fee and any storage, and shown you're entitled to the vehicle. Ringing round towing companies first will mostly cost you another day of storage charges.

What we can do is the part afterwards. Once a car is released, plenty of people find it won't start after a fortnight standing, or isn't legal to drive home. That's an ordinary recovery job — we'll collect it from the pound and take it wherever it needs to go.