Flatbed Towing for the Cars That Should Never Be Dragged: AWD, Electric, Lowered, and Damaged

The older style of tow truck, the wheel-lift, picks up one end of the car and tows it with the other end rolling. For a plain front-wheel-drive car going a few miles, that is fine. But a growing share of what is parked on Long Island driveways is all-wheel-drive, electric, or hybrid, or sits low enough that a lift would hit the bumper. For those, the only tow that does no harm is the one where the whole car rides. That is the flatbed, and it is most of Macarthur's light duty fleet.

A flatbed also has a long winch cable and a tilting deck, which means a car with a seized engine, locked wheels, a broken axle, or a crushed front end can be pulled aboard without being pushed, started, or steered. And because the deck is flat, the car is strapped at the wheels, not hooked at the frame or bumper, so nothing on the car's body takes the load. The sections below cover which vehicles must ride this way, how a load is done, the electric vehicle details, low cars, and how the flatbed is priced against the wheel-lift.

Here is what you will see when the flatbed arrives, so nothing about it is a surprise.

Approach angle is the problem. The deck tilts down to the road, and the steeper the slope the sooner a low bumper touches it. The fix is to make the slope longer: extension ramps hooked to the deck's rear edge, and wood blocks under the ramps so the first step up is shallow. For a very low car, the driver may park the truck's rear wheels in a dip or the car's front wheels on a rise to flatten the geometry further.

The winch does the moving, not the engine, so the driver can stop at any point if something is close to contact and add a board. Once on the deck, the straps go on the tires as usual; a lowered car is never hooked by its lowered suspension. Aftermarket front lips, side skirts, and air dams are the parts most often damaged by a careless tow, and they are the parts the driver is watching. If the car has air suspension, raise it to its highest setting before the truck arrives if the car will still power up. The special vehicles section on the towing page covers classics and sports cars in more detail.

Not every flatbed job starts with a breakdown. A lot of them are planned moves where the car has no plates, no insurance yet, no brakes, or simply too much value to put miles on. The flatbed picks it up at a dealership, an auction lane, a seller's driveway, or a storage unit, and delivers it to your garage, your shop, or a buyer. For a non-running car from a private seller, the driver photographs it before loading and confirms the VIN against the title you send us.

Long distance moves are scheduled rather than immediate and priced by mileage and vehicle type; the long distance towing page covers how those are set up. Dealers and repair shops use the same flatbed to shuttle inventory and customer cars between lots, and the commercial accounts section on the towing page explains how that is arranged. For equipment rather than cars, skid steers and lifts ride the same deck under equipment hauling.

From the yard on the Nassau–Queens line, the flatbeds are closest to the south shore and southeastern Queens: Valley Stream, Lynbrook, Elmont, Franklin Square, Hempstead, Rockville Centre, Oceanside, Freeport, Long Beach, and the Five Towns around Cedarhurst, and across the line in Laurelton, Rosedale, Springfield Gardens, Jamaica, and Far Rockaway.

The same trucks cover central and eastern Nassau, Garden City, Mineola, Westbury, East Meadow, Levittown, Hicksville, Plainview, Bethpage, Wantagh, and Massapequa, the north shore from Great Neck and Manhasset to Glen Cove and Syosset, and the Suffolk border towns of Amityville, Melville, and Huntington. Every town on the locations page has a flatbed page. If yours is not listed, call anyway.