If you want to glimpse the future of mobility, don’t just watch the sleek prototypes gliding down test tracks. Watch the side of the highway at 2 a.m. That’s where the story gets real. A disabled vehicle half on the shoulder, half in the lane. A tow operator working in the spray of passing traffic. Or, increasingly, a driverless car with its hazards flashing and no human to wave a triangle or pop the hood. The tow truck has always been the quiet spine of the road network, the helper that arrives when plans fall apart. As vehicles learn to drive themselves, the tow truck’s role will not fade. It will evolve, fast.
I’ve spent enough nights juggling weather, traffic, and wreckers to know this: the glamorous part of autonomy will live or die on unglamorous details. Recovery, roadside service, and the choreography of hazard scenes are those details. Every glitchy sensor and flat battery becomes a logistics problem, and logistics has always been the tow industry’s native language.
The myth of self-sufficiency
A lot of breathless talk imagines driverless cars as self-sustaining pods that glide through digital rails. The reality looks more like downtown on a rainy Friday. Autonomy will lower crash rates long term, especially for routine fender-benders, but it won’t eliminate stops, breakdowns, or edge cases. Cameras get occluded with grime. Snow stymies lane detection. A misread traffic cone creates a paralysis loop. And then there are plain old failures: tires, 12-volt auxiliary batteries, the occasional software lockup at a six-way intersection.
Even a small percentage of stuck vehicles becomes a large absolute number at scale. If 1 in 10,000 autonomous cars need roadside assistance on a given day in a city with 2 million such vehicles, that is 200 service events across 24 hours. Spread those across peak times and tricky locations, and you have a steady drumbeat of work. The tow truck, or something that plays its role, becomes first-responder infrastructure.
What “stuck” looks like when the car has no driver
Today, a stranded driver calls for help, accepts liability, signs a receipt, and rides in the cab. The operator can neutralize the transmission, steer, switch to tow mode, and watch for wheel alignment. In a driverless vehicle, the cabin is empty. Access is digital, and some steps require credentials or the right sequence of prompts. The scene itself might be oddly sterile, like rolling up to a robot that refuses to make eye contact.
This changes basic tasks. Loading a vehicle onto a flatbed depends on putting it in neutral, which may be a virtual state guarded behind software interlocks. Wheel lifts are simple until the car fights back with auto-park. Electric parking brakes hold tight without an obvious release cable. Steering may be electrically locked. I know operators who carry laminated binder sheets for each model they see often, with diagrams and “if then” notes. That improvisational notebook will become a secure app, updated weekly. The difference is not cosmetic. It will separate the operators who can clear a lane in six minutes from those who need 45.
Design for towability
Towability has been an afterthought for decades. Some automakers still bury the tow hook threads behind trim you are terrified to pry off on a $120,000 EV. We will need a new baseline: recovery-friendly design baked into the spec. That means standardized external hard points, mechanical park releases that can be triggered without cabin access, and documented winch points that won’t crush cooling plates or battery trays. It also means software that recognizes a recovery event and shifts to a safe state without constant pinging the operator with alarms.
A practical example: a toe-in recovery eyelet that folds out just enough to see under a bumper with winter grime, painted a contrasting color so you’re not guessing with a gloved hand. Or a “service neutral” invoked via a Bluetooth tool and QR code, logged for audit but accessible at the roadside within 30 seconds. These small details reduce risk and time on scene, which is what keeps everyone alive when traffic is flying past at 70.
The tow truck’s second life: mobile data and microgrid
There’s a misconception that autonomous vehicles eliminate the towing need because they can limp themselves to a safe spot. Sometimes they can. Often they can’t. When sensors misbehave or the system flags a critical fault, motion is locked out. Yet the tow truck arriving with a skilled operator is more than a winch and a bed. It can become a roving microgrid and a communications bridge.
Consider an EV fleet with low auxiliary batteries during extreme cold. The high-voltage pack may be fine, but the 12-volt system that wakes the car is down. Today, we jump those, awkwardly, with a pack meant for pickup trucks. Tomorrow’s wrecker could carry DC-DC gear that handshakes with the vehicle, revives the 12-volt bus safely, and lets the car re-engage. On the data side, a tow operator might carry a service dongle recognized by manufacturers, authorizing a secure mode that releases wheel locks and provides a limited control interface.
It is not far-fetched for tow rigs to carry modest battery buffers, 10 to 20 kWh, primarily for power tools and lighting, but increasingly to support short boosts and limited charging. The tow truck then doubles as a small energy node for spot services: freeing a vehicle from a frozen parking brake, powering a drained tire compressor in a snowstorm, or keeping hazard scene lighting independent of a generator. This is not a showpiece gadget, it is job-critical redundancy when minutes matter.
Training shifts from muscle memory to discipline of systems
I learned to “read the car” with my feet and hands. A smell of hot brakes, a steering wheel that twitches at the wrong moment, a winch cable that sings a little too high. We will still need the physical instincts, but the next layer is systems fluency. Operators must parse identity, permissions, and data before touch. You might receive a digital token to use with your device, proving you’re the contracted service. The vehicle may only accept commands when it senses beacons from your truck. If the car is part of a fleet, a remote supervisor may grant or revoke steps mid-scene based on liability rules and data confidence.
This is a different rhythm. Think aviation ground crew mixed with utility linework. Operators who shrug off paperwork will struggle, not because they lack grit, but because the job reorders tasks. Authenticate, command the safe state, verify mechanical status, then hook. Skip the first step and you trigger an incident report and a locked vehicle. The old pride in creative problem solving doesn’t go away. It just shifts toward procedural skill: get the code, enter the sequence right, capture the photo evidence, move.
New choreography at the roadside
Right now the worst part of a highway recovery is the human factor. Drivers rubberneck. Lanes squeeze. Even with flares and cones, the tow operator stands in harm’s way. Autonomy may reduce some of that chaos. If a critical mass of vehicles can communicate incident locations, they can begin slowing sooner and flow smoother around the scene. We already see early versions with connected hazard alerts.
Picture a tow truck approaching a disabled AV at dusk. As the wrecker’s beacon engages, every connected vehicle within a few hundred meters receives an event: lane X blocked, shoulder occupied, work zone presence. Their onboard planners preemptively shift lanes, brake a little earlier, and suppress the last-second lane dart that scares operators more than anything. Not every car will be connected, but the blended effect helps. In the best case, the tow truck flips from reactive to orchestrator. It broadcasts temporary geometry, and traffic behaves like a school of fish, flexing smoothly around the gap.
For this to work, the wrecker needs more than a light bar. It needs V2X transmit capability, position accuracy within a meter or two, and structured messages standardized enough that Ford, Tesla, Mobileye-powered vans, and a city bus all understand. The country doesn’t need 40 overlapping standards. It needs a short, boring document that says what a recovery beacon transmits, at what power, and with what periodic rate. When standards bodies procrastinate, operators suffer.
Liability, consent, and the quiet contract
Towing has always been wrapped in paperwork. With autonomous fleets, the liability posture changes from handshakes to API calls. You will see preAuthorized tow service providers contracted with fleet operators and insurers, with rules about when and how to move a vehicle and what data to collect. Imagine a scenario where the tow truck cannot physically disengage the e-brake until a remote fleet manager validates photos of the situation and signs off. Annoying when time is tight, but fair when a 7,000 pound EV sits inches from a battery-damaging move.
Consent is not a formality. It protects the operator too. I’ve watched seasoned drivers eat costs for damages they didn’t cause because documentation was thin. In autonomous recoveries, data helps both sides. Telemetry can show the vehicle was already faulted and immobile. Photos and timestamps can anchor the story. A clean digital trail takes heat out of disputes.
What fleets will expect from the tow truck
Large autonomous fleets will not want a roulette wheel of unknown providers. They’ll want predictable service levels, consistent technical competence, and parts of the response that behave like software. This does not diminish the independent operator. It raises the bar and creates new niches for those who adapt quickly.
I expect fleets to require a few basics. First, secure digital authentication so their cars only accept commands from authorized Tow Truck providers. Second, certified training against their recovery procedures, updated as vehicles change. Third, telemetry capture, including basic logs of when the vehicle switched states, how far it was moved, and any anomalies. Finally, service time commitments that match the duty cycle of ridehail: sub-30-minute arrival in dense cores, maybe 60 to 90 minutes at the edge.
This sounds like the world of heavy equipment service, and in some ways it is. But there is room for craft. The operator who knows where to stage in a gnarly construction zone, who can read a rain-slicked shoulder for subsurface rutting, who flags a soft pack before the flatbed sinks a foot, still outperforms a checklist. The difference is those operators will also carry a device that handshakes with six vehicle brands and can get to “service neutral” without waking a human at the fleet’s NOC.
Cold, rain, snow, and the stubborn physics of roadside work
Sensors see worse in snow and fog. Lidar hates heavy spray. Vision gets confused in low sun and patchy snow cover. Autonomy’s edge cases are the weather days when the tow industry is already stretched. Expect surge conditions: many stuck vehicles in short windows, often in unsafe spots where visibility is poor.
Here experience matters. If you’ve ever rigged a winch line with a redirect around a guardrail while keeping slack out of traffic, you know how quickly conditions change. You’re making the site safer in every small step. Add autonomous vehicles to that picture, and the work is the same with a new set of knobs: get the car quiet, predictable, and compliant, then move it. Avoid dragging locked wheels on ice, avoid loading traction control fights onto your cable. And be ready for power management oddities in cold soaked EVs, where the pack refuses to enable until warmed slightly. A tow rig with heated storage, a thermal blanket, or simply the knowledge of when to wait ten minutes after a jump can turn a delay into a save.
The economics: who pays for patience
Tow work lives on thin margins. Per-call rates are negotiated with insurers and motor clubs. Urban rates might be $90 to $250 for a basic tow, up to more for accidents, but the variance is wide and includes unpaid time. Autonomous recoveries will take longer on average while the ecosystem matures. If fleets expect their cars to be handled gently, and if authorization steps burn time, rates must reflect that. Otherwise you get a safety problem disguised as a business model. The fast operator cuts corners. The careful operator starves.
There’s a path that works. Fleets can contract zones and pay for response readiness, not just completed tows. Think standby fees, like ambulance service models, tied to performance metrics. The tow company invests in training, specialized gear, and the software stack. In return, they receive stable revenue and predictable demand. For independents, that might look like becoming a preferred provider in a few neighborhoods and a generalist elsewhere.
Remote assist and the ghost rider
One of the stranger scenes in early autonomy testing has been the parked car that wakes up, moves a few feet, and settles again with no one inside. That is remote assist. When a vehicle gets stuck in an indecisive loop, a remote operator can nudge it through a complex intersection or a blocked construction zone. For roadside recovery, remote assist can be a friend or a hassle. It is helpful when the fleet can put the vehicle into a known recovery posture. It is unhelpful when the vehicle attempts self-rescue as you’re trying to hook it, or when it insists on rechecking sensors mid-load.
The fix is coordination. Tow trucks and remote assist teams need a common language: when the wrecker’s beacon is in “recovery active” mode, the fleet stops trying to self-resolve. The vehicle stays in a quiet state, not dead, but with no surprises. This is a matter of policy and code. It should be boring. If it isn’t, someone gets hurt.
Rural realities
Cities get the press, but plenty of autonomous miles will be run on controlled corridors between towns and through rural delivery routes. Recovery there is a different animal. You may be 70 miles from the nearest certified service provider. Cellular redundancy will be spotty. Snowplows and farm trucks will outnumber bronco-towing.com taxis. The Tow Truck here is not just a mover, it’s the only tool for hours.
Rural rigs should be overbuilt for self-sufficiency: spare tires for the truck and the towed vehicle, extra fuel, a battery buffer big enough to keep lights and comms alive through a night stuck behind a closure. Operators will need offline procedures for authentication that don’t depend on a cloud handshake. A sealed envelope in the glovebox with one-time codes might feel retro, but when the hills eat your signal, it is the difference between stuck and solved.
Safety is still the first and last word
No fancy gadget changes the physics of a Buick blowing past at 75. Even with connected alerts and better choreography, the tow operator remains the most vulnerable person on the scene. The basics we teach rookies are not negotiable in an autonomous future: park the truck to protect the work area, angle the wheels away from the lane, establish a taper, get conspicuity right, don’t turn your back to traffic longer than necessary. If the road curves, set advance warning upstream, not where drivers will first see you on the bend. If the weather is bad, overdo lighting without blinding anyone. And keep scenes tight. Long, lazy winch lines are convenient until a driver drifts across the shoulder.
Some things should change. Recovery zones deserve the same enforcement teeth as construction zones: higher fines, aggressive signage, and in connected corridors, automated speed management nudges. If a network can dim a billboard, it can tell cruise control to hold 45 by a live recovery. That kind of protective envelope would save lives, and the tech exists.
Skills and tools for the next decade
As automation grows up, the best tow operators will look like hybrid mechanics, network techs, and the same stubborn problem-solvers they’ve always been. A small, realistic kit evolves from current practice into something like this:
- A secure device with manufacturer apps for authorized recovery modes, a ruggedized cable set, and a way to verify “service neutral” quickly without guesswork. A compact DC-DC power unit capable of safely reviving 12-volt systems on modern EVs, with proper isolation and surge protection. V2X beacon hardware integrated into the light bar to broadcast standardized roadside worker presence and lane geometry messages. Modular wheel dollies designed for heavier EV curb weights, plus soft slings that avoid battery trays and coolant lines. A digital evidence routine baked into muscle memory: four photos, state confirmation, timestamped handoff logs, and immediate upload when the signal returns.
That’s one list. It won’t replace judgment. It supports it.
What carmakers can do to help
Manufacturers control much of this outcome. The easiest wins are mundane. Standardize tow points across product lines. Make service neutral accessible from outside, gated by secure but simple authentication. Publish short, clear recovery procedures with pictures. Put a physical identifier – a coded decal or smart tag – near the front and rear tow points that operators can scan without crawling in slush. Add a “recovery mode” that kills automated antics and sets brakes, steering, and suspension to predictable states.
One underappreciated idea is a tiny status light near the license plate visible to roadside workers. Green for recovery mode engaged and safe to move, amber for pending, red for locked and waiting on authorization. A simple tri-color dot beats an operator guessing whether the car will roll or clamp halfway up the bed.
The Tow Truck as teacher
Across hundreds of recoveries, tow operators learn things manufacturers and software teams never see. The angle of a bumper that snags straps. A cable routing that traps road salt and freezes a sensor in February. Patterns in where vehicles give up, like mid-block bus stops after fresh snow. If we’re smart, we will loop this experience upstream. Give operators a fast track to report high-value field issues, with photos and a short template that goes to someone who can fix it. Pay a modest bounty for fixes that reduce recovery time or improve safety. This isn’t charity. It pays for itself in fewer blocked lanes and fewer damaged components.
The human day inside a changing job
The romance of the job has always included odd hours and the satisfaction of making chaos orderly. That doesn’t change. You still get the nights where the city feels like a whisper and the only thing moving is your rig and the plows. You still get the fiddly jobs where you thread a strap through a grille without scarring the paint, knowing the owner will never notice, and that’s fine because the point was doing it right.
What will change is the cognitive load. More screens, more protocols, more moments that feel like a cockpit checklist. That can be tiring, but it also makes the work legible and safer. The pride will shift from “I figured it out” to “we ran the play, and nobody got hurt.” For many of us, that’s an upgrade.
A practical path from here to there
None of this requires perfect autonomy. It requires that we treat the Tow Truck as a first-class citizen of the new road system. Three modest steps can move the needle quickly.
- Create a simple, shared recovery message standard for V2X that every light bar can broadcast and every vehicle can read. Keep it small, stable, and open. Require, through procurement or regulation, that autonomous-capable vehicles include standardized external tow points and a documented recovery mode accessible to authorized providers. Build certification programs in partnership with manufacturers and fleets, not as gatekeeping, but as a living library of procedures, tied to fair compensation and realistic service-level expectations.
Those steps reduce friction and risk. They honor the work already done by a trade that rarely asks for credit, only better conditions.
The road ahead
Autonomy will change the flow of traffic and the nature of crashes. It will shift blame around and rewire insurance spreadsheets. What it won’t change is this simple fact: machines fail, nature surprises, and people need help. The Tow Truck will keep showing up. The gear will look a little different, the dashboards will be busier, and the contracts will mention APIs. The core remains the same. A person arrives when the system is out of answers, reads the situation, makes the scene safe, and moves the stuck thing from where it is to where it needs to be.
If we design for that reality, the future will feel less like a brittle demo and more like a working city. And on a winter night, when an autonomous shuttle sits quietly at the curb with its hazards blinking and no one inside, a wrecker will pull up. The operator will tap a code, watch a small light turn green, and get to work. Traffic will part, steady and calm. Ten minutes later, the lane will be clear. That is progress, measured in yards and minutes, which is the only kind that sticks.
Bronco Towing 4484 E Tennessee St Tucson, AZ 85714 (520) 885-1925