Light Duty Towing in Island Trees, NY, for Cars, SUVs, Vans, and Pickups

"Light duty" is the towing trade's name for everything that is not a truck, bus, or trailer. For a Island Trees driver it means the vehicle in the driveway: a Honda or Toyota sedan, a Subaru or a Jeep, a minivan full of car seats, a contractor's van with the day's tools in the back, a half-ton pickup. All of these ride on Macarthur's flatbeds or wheel-lift wreckers, which are the trucks that make up most of the fleet at 170 East Lincoln Avenue in Valley Stream.

The reasons are the ordinary ones. The car will not start and a jump did not fix it. It overheated and should not be run another mile. The transmission revs without moving. A tire shredded and there is no spare. It was in an accident and a wheel is not pointing straight. Or nothing is wrong at all, and the car needs to go to a dealer, a buyer, or a storage unit without putting miles on it. Each of these is a routine job for a driver who does several a shift in Island Trees, Jericho, Kensington, and the rest of Nassau County.

What light duty towing does not cover is anything on a commercial chassis: box trucks, cutaway vans with a box, buses, dump trucks, and tractor trailers. Those need the heavy wrecker, and the heavy duty towing in Island Trees page covers them. If you are not sure which side your vehicle falls on, tell us the make and model and we will say.

A car that needs to come out of a Island Trees parking lot is usually straightforward: the truck lines up with it, and the driver winches it backward onto the deck or lifts it from the rear and pulls it clear of the space. What helps is knowing the business name, which side of the building the car is on, and whether it is in a space, in a lane, or blocking a door. Garages are a different job, because a flatbed is tall and most garage entrances are posted below its height.

Parking garages are where the truck choice matters. A flatbed is tall, and most garage entrances in Nassau County are posted well below its height. If your car is in a garage, give us the posted clearance; we send a wheel-lift for a car that can take one, or, for an AWD or an EV that must ride on a flatbed, the wheel-lift brings the car to the garage exit on dollies and the flatbed takes it from there. A car on an upper level with a tight ramp is the same job with more care.

Tight apartment lots, narrow driveways with a car behind yours, and cars parked against a fence or a wall all come down to the same thing: tell us how the car is sitting. The driver has long ramps, boards, dollies, and a winch, and he has gotten cars out of tighter spots in Island Trees, Jericho, and Kings Point than the one you are describing. What he cannot do is guess from the street, so the call is where the plan gets made.

Distance is the biggest factor: the miles from where the car sits in Island Trees to where it is going, so give both addresses. The vehicle and the truck come next; a compact on a wheel-lift is a smaller job than an AWD SUV on a flatbed, and the year, make, and model tells us which it is. Recovery work, winching a car out of a ditch, off a lawn, or out of a snowbank before it can be loaded, is priced as recovery; tell us how the car is sitting and we include it. Night and holiday calls are priced as such, and we say so on the phone.

What does not move the number is whether you use our body shop, because you are never required to. What we will not do is quote low to get the truck to Island Trees and climb once the car is on the hook. If the job on arrival is what you described, the quote is the price. If the driver finds a different job, a car described as in a driveway that is actually in a garage with no clearance, or a car that was "on the grass" but is in a ditch, he tells you the new number before he touches the car, and you decide.

Payment is settled with the driver or the office; ask when you call about how you would like to pay. The how a tow is priced section on the towing page goes through each factor in more detail.

Most of the delay in a collision repair happens before anyone touches the car: it sits at a tow yard, waits for an inspection, waits for a second tow, and then waits for an estimate that has already been written once. Because Macarthur's trucks and Macarthur's body shop are the same business, a car recovered in Island Trees is in the shop's lot the same day, and the estimate, the photographs, and the adjuster's inspection all happen where the car will be fixed. The accident recovery in Island Trees page covers the scene and the first calls.

The shop at 170 East Lincoln Avenue is certified by Honda and Acura, Nissan, Infiniti, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, and Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram, is I-CAR Gold Class, and repairs every make and model to the manufacturer's procedure; the plaques are on the certifications page. Under New York law you choose the body shop, not your insurer. If you would rather the car went to your own mechanic or dealer, it does.

The same light duty fleet covers Jericho, Kensington, Kings Point, and every other town in Nassau County. See everything we do for Island Trees, or find another town on the locations page.