In this episode, When Towers Encounter Electric Vehicles, we welcomed Chris Young, Owner of Tow Truck Tech and Doug Wallace, General Manager of Santa Fe Tow Service, who discussed the nuances of towing electric vehicles and how the new technology has affected certain practices in the towing industry. Click play to listen.

Shelli Hawkins:

Welcome back everybody. We are here at TRAXERO On-The-Go with episode 12 of our podcast and we could not be more excited about today’s podcast, the topic and also the folks that are going to be joining us. Laura Dolan.

Laura Dolan:

Yes, Shelli and I wish I could join your enthusiasm. I’m actually feeling a little bit down right now.

Shelli Hawkins:

What can I do to sprinkle some amazingness on your day?

Laura Dolan:

Well, this is our last podcast of 2023.

Shelli Hawkins:

Oh gosh. You are right. I didn’t think about it that way.

Laura Dolan:

Not our last podcast forever. Some of you are probably hoping for that, but no, we are going to come back very strong in 2024, but this is the last podcast of 2023.

Shelli Hawkins:

12 podcast episodes in the year. I say that we should have a round of applause.

Laura Dolan:

If you want to get technical it’s 14, because two of these podcasts had two parts.

Shelli Hawkins:

You are not wrong. That’s a lot.

Laura Dolan:

Yeah. Not a bad run for considering we started in March of this year. This thing didn’t even exist before 2023, so I could not be more proud and more happy, Shelli to have done this with you. I just want to thank my partner in crime for making this so successful and knowing which guests to bring on and coordinating all the scheduling. I know how difficult that can be in this industry with everybody’s [unpredictable]  schedules. So just want to thank everyone who made this a success being on the show this year and yeah, let’s just keep it on rolling.

Shelli Hawkins:

Thank you Laura. Laura is our person that after once we have recorded the podcast, she goes behind the scenes and edits everything. So sometimes there’s a lot of editing to do and sometimes there’s not. So thank you Laura. We really appreciate your ability to do all that for us.

Laura Dolan:

It’s a labor of love. Thank you.

Shelli Hawkins:

Indeed. We’re going to talk about two amazing things that have happened recently. First of all, my friend Laura Dolan has celebrated a birthday. Happy birthday.

Laura Dolan:

Thank you.

Shelli Hawkins:

And you had something miraculous, not miraculous. You had something very special happen on your birthday that you wished for or you really enjoy. What was it?

Laura Dolan:

We got some snow flurries in Ohio and I said to my husband, I said, “This will be the perfect birthday if we just get a little bit, just a little bit of snow flurries.” And I’m sitting here in my office and I could see it out the window and my garden is right in front of my window and I see these little white things that kind of caught my eye and I was like, “It’s flurrying!” And I run to the back door and I open it and it was just this beautiful, it didn’t stick, but it was just enough just to make me happy and I just feel like it makes the air so beautiful. So we moved to Ohio for four seasons. We’re from the West Coast, so that’s why my enthusiasm is through the roof. I know most of you are like, “Please shut up. Just stop talking.”

Shelli Hawkins:

For sure. We’ve got our podcast guest behind the scenes smiling right now that we’re going to bring on in a second, but we also, so happy birthday and we also wrapped up our very last trade show of the year at the Baltimore Tow Show and it was spectacular, Laura. I mean give us some highlights. How do you think it went?

Laura Dolan:

I think it went really well. We had a steady stream of traffic all three days. Obviously Thursday was the shortest day, but considering that was like a preview day, I felt like we just had a steady stream of people in the booth. We had a lot of great conversations. We accumulated a lot of very solid leads. We had customers talking to prospects about our products. I mean they made our lives easier. We didn’t even have to intervene. We just stood there and listened to the conversations and it was fantastic. The tow trucks were there, obviously there were tow trucks there. There were 80 that entered the beauty pageant, right Shelli?

Shelli Hawkins:

Correct.

Laura Dolan:

80 trucks. We had over 12,000 in attendance, over 225 exhibitors, 300 medals given out at the four different award ceremonies and the best part about the Baltimore Tow Show, because it’s so close to Thanksgiving on Saturday afternoon, they served pie, a bunch of different flavors of pie and it was over 400 slices of pie that were given out to the spectators. So it was so fun to sit there in the booth and watch everybody walk by with their little slices of pie. So I thought that was really special.

Shelli Hawkins:

So many traditions, yeah. Loved it.

Laura Dolan:

And it was my first one so I was very excited to be there and we had a great team that went. There were 14 of us I believe from TRAXERO, so yeah, great time.

Shelli Hawkins:

Always a great time at the Baltimore show, for sure. Thank you so much for coordinating a lot of that, especially on our socials. You always do a fantastic job.

Laura Dolan:

Well, thank you for getting all the swag together.

Shelli Hawkins:

You bet. It is a labor of love and an endeavor and we knocked it out of the park. So today’s topic is something that I am very excited to talk about. We could probably host about five to 10 podcasts over the next course of the few months just talking about this one topic and that is electric vehicles. And what we know for sure is 30 years ago,= the consumer vehicles that were on the road were much more simpler. They were easier for the tower to maneuver around to service. Also tow trucks were a lot more simpler. However, as we are here in 2023 tow trucks and our consumer vehicles and even our tractor trailers are getting much more sophisticated. And so with that, our towers need to also become more sophisticated to match what is the complexity out there with these cars on the roadway today, and I am excited to bring on two experts for the electric vehicle market. One is Mr. Chris Young and he is the president and owner of Tow Truck Tech. Chris, are you there with us?

Chris Young:

I am

Shelli Hawkins:

Welcome. Welcome to the podcast. We’re excited to have you.

Chris Young:

Thank you. I appreciate you.

Shelli Hawkins:

Perfect. And we also have Mr. Doug Wallace, general manager over at Santa Fe Towing in Lenexa, Kansas. Hey Doug.

Doug Wallace:

Hello.

Shelli Hawkins:

Hey, it’s great to have you. We’re excited you’re joining us for the podcast today. We’re going to cover a lot of different topics. I just want to start out for our audience, kind of give them an idea a little bit about you guys. I’m going to ask Doug to go first. Doug, first of all, where are you sitting today? Where do you live? Where do you work and what company do you work for and what do you do for them? Just lay out all that for us.

Doug Wallace:

Today I’m sitting, I ran home, I’m sitting at my house in Spring Hill, Kansas. I work for Santa Fe Tow in Lenexa, dealing with John up there for about 10 years. Been in the industry for right at 30 now and just kind of oversee the day-to-day, still operate a truck, still pretty hands-on and still enjoy what I do. It’s been a good ride.

Shelli Hawkins:

I love it. I actually got to go on a rollover call with Doug Wallace a few years ago. That was pretty incredible. It was a dually ramp that had rolled over, I believe.

Doug Wallace:

Yeah, I think we had a wedge trailer with three cars getting ready to pull into the dealership that had an incident pulling into the parking lot. Yep. That was an interesting morning.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah, an incident. I’m like how you said that, but that was really great. I’ve been to Santa Fe towing a few times to visit the folks down there, Mr. John Kupchin, the owner, Kyle and Kaileigh, also his children that are helping Doug run the business today in different aspects. What a great crew you guys have at Santa Fe. You run an amazing operation. Thank you Doug for coming.

Doug Wallace:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Shelli Hawkins:

You bet. Mr. Chris Young. It is your turn next, run down all that for us. How did you get in the towing industry? Where are you living? What are you doing for the industry?

Chris Young:

Got into the towing industry through the repossession space about 30 years ago. Was looking for a gig I could work nights because I want to go back to school during the day and had a friend who had a friend who was in the repossession space and ended up getting a job with them and spent about 20 years doing repossessions. Ended up owning repossession agency for about 10 of those years after I graduated from school. Now I write content, a lot of training content for guys that run wreckers still. I’ve been doing that for like 15 years for a couple network clients, a couple OEM clients. In 2023, I kind of shifted that onto social media as a little bit of a social experiment to prove a couple things to some people and in 12 months we’ve managed to accrue about 2.5 million views on all of our social media. So we’ve had a pretty good year on the social media front, getting some training content out there that way and we’re going to continue down that road for the foreseeable future.

Shelli Hawkins:

I have had the privilege to see a lot of your content, YouTube, TikTok, etc., and it is pretty powerful. Very thorough, very dynamic. Doug, have you had a chance to see any of his YouTubes?

Doug Wallace:

I have not, but I did make a note. I’m going to go check that out.

Shelli Hawkins:

Oh yeah, they’re really, really great. Short, to the point, and just instructional type videos about a lot of them today are about electric vehicles and that’s why Chris is joining us. So I’m going to ask the question about that TikTok that went viral. What is it about Chris?

Chris Young:

It’s about mobile charging, of all things. Mobile charging has been a hot topic in the towing groups in the last 90, 120 days and I’ve been watching a lot of the groups and seeing what folks are saying about it and I kind of distilled mobile charging down to its basic elements and all it really is, and this is probably not going to surprise a lot of people, it’s a portable generator and it’s a wall unit. That’s all it is. I bought one of those Ford F-150 power boosts and I got it with that 7.2 kilowatt kit in the bed because I wanted to use the truck for demonstrating some charging stuff when we’re handling these EVs, when we’re shooting TikToks because my truck is always on wherever we’re shooting. I always have the truck and I’ve not been really able to demonstrate the physical charging of vehicles.

I’m like, I’m just going to get this. I was getting a new truck, so I just ordered it like that. Then I got the Gen2 mobile charger from Tesla. We were doing a lot of Teslas at the time, so we just started doing it with that and that kind of got me tuned up on this whole mobile charging space and I started breaking down one of the popular chargers. It’s like this is actually pretty simple. That video hit and we got a lot of replies to that.

I got an idea that we’re just going to take and buy all the components to it and we’re going to prove it works. We’re going to buy all the components, show what we pay for it, where we get it. One of my neighbors is an electrical engineer, so he’s going to help me put the thing together and we’re going to charge about a half a dozen cars with it. We’re going to chronicle the whole thing on social media and I’m just going to give that unit away to someone.

Shelli Hawkins:

I love it and I promise you when Doug Wallace sees this video, he’s going to say, “We can do that. That’s pretty simple.” I like it.

Chris Young:

He can absolutely do it. Absolutely. I mean, I’ve got a rental car agency that’s wanting to have a conversation about mobile charging and they’re trying to figure out finding vendors. It’s like, no, we’ll put together a solution for you. It’ll be vertically integrated in the company. We’ll come and we’ll train the people and you won’t have to worry about calling someone else.

Shelli Hawkins:

Outstanding. So as I talked about, cars have evolved and so when a car runs out of gas, the towing company services that person taking them what, four to five gallons of gas? And I’m going to ask Doug Wallace the question. Today when you guys have an electric vehicle that is dead, do you charge it? Do you tow it? What do you do with it?

Doug Wallace:

It’s kind of interesting that you ask because when it first came about, I think there’s some people in the forefront like Chris that came out with a system to charge them. We had the unit sit in the garage and I don’t think that we ever deployed it once. I think most people were pretty proactive at the beginning, but then as time evolves, it’s kind of the running out of gas. It’s no longer in the forefront of your brain anymore that I got to charge this thing. We no longer have it and I think we had it on a demo at the time. We just move them closer to some of our customers. We move closer to the charging station. So we’ve been in a situation where we go out to the Amazon facilities and just get the vehicle to the charger station where they can charge but it hasn’t become prevalent yet. We’re out doing mobile charging to get them into the next charging station or to charge them back up to get them going. So I’m sure it’s coming.

Shelli Hawkins:

For sure. So you’re in Kansas City, Lenexa, Kansas, that area, a very densely saturated area with folks. And what would you say are the top two electric vehicles that you folks are servicing today?

Doug Wallace:

The top two in our area is going to be the Teslas and the Rivians.

Shelli Hawkins:

The Rivians. And any reason why Rivian is so prevalent there?

Doug Wallace:

I think Rivian is pretty prevalent here. You’re starting to see some of the pickups around too, that the people are buying the pickups, but you’re primarily seeing them as the Amazon delivery vehicles.

Shelli Hawkins:

Sure. Are you guys close to a service center or?

Doug Wallace:

We have, yeah, several service centers on the contractors that have them.

Shelli Hawkins:

Oh, that makes sense, that makes sense it’s a great way. Have you ever been out there to visit the place out there, Chris or?

Chris Young:

The service center?

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah.

Chris Young:

We have one service center here in St. Louis and I haven’t been to it yet, but I’ve been to the Normal plant several times. I helped them develop their roadside program with their network roadside provider, so I’ve been in and out of the Normal plant a lot. It’s an amazing place. It really is.

Shelli Hawkins:

Laura, I forgot to wear my Normal T-shirt. I have a T-shirt that just says Normal across the front because that’s the manufacturing plant, Normal, Illinois for the Rivian, so it’s navy blue with bright yellow letters. I’m like, I should have wore that today. I mean we’re not going to see the video, just hear it, but yeah, I know a lot of towers in that area that also service, do service and move the Rivians, but yeah. So we’d like to talk about what are the most common challenges for the electric vehicle out there to talk about it. I think that if we could rewind a little bit when things started getting sophisticated, would you say that that electric parking brake was probably one of the first electric type additions to the car to happen for the tower scratching his head saying, how do we do this? What do we do with this? Or does it go further back?

Doug Wallace:

No, I mean I think it starts there and it continues to be there. I think in a lot of situations the electric parking brake creates a lot of challenges, especially it depends on whether the vehicle’s at their house or we spoke about the vehicles in the parking garages, but I would say the 12 volt system being down, not being able to get into tow mode, whether it’s Rivian or Tesla, for us the parking brake has been a huge issue for us being able to get them out of certain situations.

Shelli Hawkins:

And what has been successful for you?

Doug Wallace:

It just kind of depends. Everything’s kind of unique and different, but the biggest thing I think we usually use if we get is the skates, the nylon skates, just get them to slide parking garages with height clearance creates other issues for us too, but the weight of the vehicles and just the location. But I’d say skates gets us out of nine out of 10 situations.

Shelli Hawkins:

I was telling Laura about skates this morning and how they go under all four tires or at least the first two and before that there was Dawn dish washing liquid that you would put on the bed of the truck. Most stores that have been around for any length of time have done that for sure.

Doug Wallace:

Still a great tool.

Laura Dolan:

I use Dawn Dish soap for a lot of things myself.

Doug Wallace:

It’s biodegradable. It’s a great tool for your toolbox, especially on a rollback operator.

Chris Young:

What about the gold McDonald’s platters?

Shelli Hawkins:

What?

Chris Young:

Remember that?

Doug Wallace:

Yep. It was a great tool as well too. I wish they were still around.

Chris Young:

Push come to shove, you jack them up a little bit. Slide a McDonald’s platter from, remember they used to have the big deals you carried your food on, slide those under the tires and you could drag the car everywhere.

Shelli Hawkins:

Are you serious?

Chris Young:

Yes.

Shelli Hawkins:

I’ve never heard of this, but Doug says yes and Chris says yes. So it’s a thing.

Laura Dolan:

I got to know the origin story of that. Did somebody just get resourceful like, okay, how am I going to get this out of here? I’m at McDonald’s, “Hey, can I borrow one of your trays?” How did this happen?

Chris Young:

What happened was some wrecker operator figured it out and then everyone found out about it and this is before social media, so imagine how long it took for that to get around.

Laura Dolan:

Seriously, how did life hacks get around back then?

Shelli Hawkins:

I’m going to see for sure if Rene has ever done this. I’m guessing that he has for sure. Yeah, Chris is like, “Yeah, he’s done it.”

Chris Young:

Absolutely. I guarantee it.

Doug Wallace:

It’d probably be easy to store on the rollback today too, speaking of it. So if he could find some. It’s like milk crates. Yep.

Chris Young:

Yeah.

Shelli Hawkins:

One of the challenges that comes to mind with electric vehicles that is different that the tower has to address, it’s going to be the weight, because they’ve never had a consumer car weigh so much before. When you look at a model Y Tesla or even one of the Rivians, Chris, do you know Doug? The weight of these vehicles?

Chris Young:

Yeah, so R1T is mid-sevens, the pickup truck and the R1S is like 6,800. We actually have, that was one of our little campaigns we were doing on social media was I was running these things across the scale at the Road Runner down in Fenton. Whenever we were taking a car and doing whatever we were doing that we’d take and run across the scale and actually show people what they weighed because when we did F-150 Lightning at the time, I was driving an ’18 and we were showing the difference between an ’18, regular 3.5 turbo, 4X4 against a comparably equipped Lightning and they’re like 2000 pounds apart. So Rivian R1T is low to mid sevens. R1S is like 68 something.

The Rivian EDV I know a lot of guys like to say it’s 14,000 pounds. It’s like 7,500. It’s got a GVWR under 10,000. It’s like 9560, but they’re still heavy vehicles. I mean the Mach E is a heavy vehicle. The only auto manufacturer’s done a really good job keeping the weight down is Tesla. The Teslas are relatively light. We weighed a model three and it weighed about the same as a Ford Fusion.

Shelli Hawkins:

Okay.

Chris Young:

Yeah, Tesla’s done a really good job at saving weight.

Shelli Hawkins:

So I’ll just ask the question. I know that the largest capacity of dollies out there, whether they’re in the ditch or Collins, is going to be the 5.7 dollies. I mean that’s just, the tire is bigger, right? All the components, side frames, etc. are all the exact same thing. I know that dollying an electric vehicle is not ideal, but in some circumstances you have to. I can only imagine that just to get them out of the parking garage. It’s something that has to be done until a rollback can show up. Can you guys talk a little bit about dollying them and then the weight on the rollback itself? What’s the impact?

Doug Wallace:

Yeah, we typically, and usually the situations that we run into the dollies as far as getting one out, it kind of depends on the most common, I’d say in a situation when we go to the parking garage, whether we’re going to the airport in Kansas City for that or downtown on the plaza to get cars out of the parking garage, just get them into the service centers. We’re dealing with the height issue to get the clearance out of the garage and we’ll typically dispatch two trucks at the same time and have the rollback stage out on the street while the wrecker will go in there and dolly the truck out to where, load it on the rollback. But typically we won’t as just as a general rule, we won’t dolly one into the service center just mainly because of the weight. The risk isn’t worth the reward.

We’ll get them out of the parking garage, let them on a two car and then transport them to where they need to go. And the same thing, we get some houses where the driveway goes around the house and the garage actually comes in into the backside or sometimes the dollies on that situation where you can’t get the rollback squared to the car to be able to get them in and get them out. That’s usually the situation we run into, but we typically always transport even the Rivians, before we putting the Rivian, the delivery vehicles and the Teslas, everything on a rollback typically.

Chris Young:

What size rollback you use on that, Doug? A 21 or like a 24 light industrial?

Doug Wallace:

Well, we prefer to put the 16 series on the delivery vehicles. They’ve got guidelines on where they just barely fit on there and they’ve, and Rivian’s been really, really good to us as far as sharing the information and they’ve gone out field tested it and shown how with the eight points, how they want them transported and show that you get it just within inches of the headache rack and they’ve shared a lot of good information. We prefer to move those delivery vehicles on the 16 series. That’s just a little bit longer bed where we got more of a surface area to secure them with the eight points. But everything else we just put on a regular two car. But as far as weights go there, they’re a little heavy on there, but the pickup truck for the Rivian’s heavier than delivery vehicles, so the delivery vehicle we’re just dealing with length.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah, share a little bit about what you told me a while back about the Rivian company coming out and visiting with you guys.

Doug Wallace:

So Rivian actually reached out, they’ve got a service center, which is probably about 10 minutes south of us here that we were fortunate enough that they reached out. We were able to go down there, tour their facility and got to meet with the service manager and they toured the shop and they showed us the ins and the outs where they store their jacks and they just gave us familiarization I guess with their product and their parking brake systems and they just kind of gave us a lot of education, in-person education. They shared contact information that if we had questions at two o’clock in the morning, this is who you call, this is what you do, but every single dispatch that you would get from Rivian, they’d email you the towing guidelines with it.

So they’re pretty forthcoming sharing information as far as getting their products moved. We had a great experience with them. The one thing that I liked that they had, I wish that we could get our hands on, I shared this with you was it’s just the ability to get the parking brake released. Once we get there, they’ve got a tool they can plug into or release their parking brake, but they wouldn’t even let us hold it. So it’s a closely guarded secret.

Shelli Hawkins:

And I’m sure Chris Young can speak to that.

Chris Young:

With the shop tool. Yeah, no, they don’t want you on those connectors at all. Those connectors have a cycle of life and they have a really good idea of what that is, so they don’t want people in there connecting them, disconnecting them. I’ve had countless conversations with them about trying to figure out some sort of parking brake defeat for that rear axle on the EDV and it’s not in the plans. It would be easier to wrecker tow those than the carrier tow them. But yeah, they’ve got a lot of closely guarded secrets, but they’ve got a lot of really good people working over there. They’ve got a lot of engineers over there that are very adept with those vehicles. I mean they’ve done a phenomenal job with both R1 products and the EDV and R2 will be a phenomenal vehicle as well. I mean they have a stellar crew over there.

Shelli Hawkins:

Outstanding. I’ll tell you that I stumbled across a series on Apple TV called “The Long Road Up”. That was a journey for two gentlemen from the very bottom of South Africa all the way to Los Angeles and they were on two Harley Davidson motorcycles that were 100% electric. Just imagine that journey and what followed them during the entire series were two Rivians as their crew. So four electric vehicles from the very bottom of South America all the way to Los Angeles, California and it is worth the watch. I’ve gone back and watched it a couple of times since then. “The Long Road Up”. I’d never heard of Rivians before that they’ve come a long way. That was many, many years ago.

Chris Young:

That was prototype.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah. Probably.

Chris Young:

That was before they were really, really reliable.

Shelli Hawkins:

And they’re in deserts, mountains, literally any type of landscape you can ever imagine, mud, they’re in it. If you guys need something new to watch and entertaining and you’re okay with Harley Davidson’s being all electric, I’d recommend “The Long Road Up”.

Laura Dolan:

What streaming service was this again? You said Apple?

Shelli Hawkins:

Apple, yes.

Laura Dolan:

Apple. Okay.

Shelli Hawkins:

So there’s “Long Road Up”, “Long Road Down” and a couple others, but this is the one that I really enjoyed.

Laura Dolan:

Nice.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah. When it comes to other common problems we talk about with the electric vehicle, there’s the completely dead battery. Doug, when you get there on scene or your guys get there on scene, more than likely, what is the first path to getting this thing moving? What do you guys recommend?

Doug Wallace:

I’d say on the one that we run into the most on the 12-volt system, getting it powered up to get into the 12-volt system I think is the first one that comes to mind is going to be the Tesla and just the ability to get to the main lines to get a booster pack on it or some sort of power to it to get things fired up and going. And we’ve been pretty, I guess fortunate we just haven’t had that much issue getting the 12-volt system up. We’ve had a few where we’ve gone through a few different things to get it powered up, but they’ve done a pretty good job.

I think it’s the knowledge and the education or the information sharing of where to go to get to those points has been key for us. We’ve got a couple of guys that are really, really sharp with those and I think Tesla has been pretty forthcoming with sharing that information with us as well as far as getting the education or the training manuals into our hands and their information to know where to find those points.

Shelli Hawkins:

So once you have it jumped and once it is like you said, you’ve woke the system up, what are the next steps?

Doug Wallace:

They’re usually just getting in tow mode and then we’re getting everything freed up to where we get the parking brake released and end up in a position where we get it loaded on the truck and get it into the service center.

Shelli Hawkins:

And just pretend like we know nothing. What is tow mode? Educate us.

Doug Wallace:

Tow mode, it just means where it kind of disconnects the electric motors. I feel like it’s a means where disconnects the electric motors, but it just puts it to where we can actually free roll backup onto the truck and release the parking brakes.

Laura Dolan:

So tow mode does release the electric parking brake?

Doug Wallace:

It’s two different systems, from my understanding. But it gives us to where we can roll the vehicles.

Laura Dolan:

And what do you do if you ever get in a situation where you can’t unlock the car? Because as a Tesla owner we have a phone app and we also have a key card. A lot of owners don’t have their key cards with them and if they don’t have their phones near them, how do you enter the vehicle? Have you ever encountered anything like that?

Doug Wallace:

We have and they’re actually pretty delicate because the side pieces are glass and where the long reach, I don’t have a good answer for you on that. I think that there’s been times where we’ve called Tesla and Tesla can actually remotely unlock your vehicle. If it doesn’t work I think it’s a mechanical means at that point, but it hasn’t been without issue or without trial and error in the past either. So I don’t have a really good answer. I’d have to go to my guy that moves a lot of those to give you a good direction on what we’ve done to get into those before in the past. And it may be just a situation where we’ve loaded them up and taken to the dealer, but I think we have been successful getting those in there. I just don’t have a good answer for you on that.

Chris Young:

In my opinion, a lockout should be completely avoided on a Tesla at all costs because the B pillar is glass and they have the convertible door where there’s no door frame and the window is shoved up in the weather strip.

Shelli Hawkins:

So it’s like a frameless window exponentially worse.

Chris Young:

So when you open the door, it’ll short drop the window, which it drops it like three eighths of an inch. So you can open the door and when you go in there with a long reach tool, if there’s no power to the car and you pop the door on the mechanical release, when there’s power customarily, the window will short drop. If there’s no power, the window won’t short drop and you risk blowing the glass out of the car. Or if the front doors are laminate glass, they’re two pane laminate glass so you’ll just crack the window. So I mean honestly, the best way to do it is to call Tesla and if the vehicle is dead and you can ascertain it’s dead, go ahead and get a 12 volt jump going on it. Contact either the owner and have them do it remotely over their phone or have Tesla do it. I mean if it has to be done and we’ve shown this on some of our videos, if it has to be done, it can be done, but it should be done with the utmost of caution.

Shelli Hawkins:

Doug, do you guys do tire changes in the field?

Doug Wallace:

We do on Tesla. Well we do them on Rivian. Rivian’s typically usually have a tire with them. Teslas, we store quite a few tires at the facility for Teslas.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah, I’m not saying that that’s something problematic, but you want that smooth ride with the Tesla and so you can’t have a gigantic lug, not a lug, but a gigantic thick healthy tire and still have that smooth ride on such a heavy vehicle. So I know that that is one of the challenges is going to be the tires. Would you say it’s just getting charged up and recharged and the tire, the top two services you provide, Doug?

Doug Wallace:

Yeah, I would say just the transportation in the tire service. Tire services, it seems like everything has its season, whether it seems like we’re in tire change season, that’s the season when we’re in going to the dealer, we’re in going to the dealer season, but there’s quite a few Tesla tires that need to be changed. Believe it or not it’s kind of a mind boggling how many tires we change on a Tesla.

Shelli Hawkins:

And then after you do the tire change, just get them rolling?

Doug Wallace:

Yeah, we get them rolling and what we end up doing then is we get them going. They don’t have anywhere to put the tire typically in the vehicle, so we’ll drop the tire off at the service center. They go in there and they get the tire fixed customer comes back in, they get their tire wheel put back on and then we cycle back through and replenish our stock.

Shelli Hawkins:

Laura Dolan, isn’t it so reassuring for you as a Tesla owner to know that there are amazing people like Doug Wallace out there and his crew that know what they’re doing and taking care of your vehicle?

Laura Dolan:

Trust me, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation because not only am I getting educated, but it’s also kind of easing my fears that if we ever do encounter anything like that because yeah, fun fact Tesla doesn’t have a spare tire, so it’s just like what do you do in that situation? But knowing that you actually have tires in stock, is that kind of a requirement for towers to have access to something like that?

Doug Wallace:

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a requirement. I think it is for Tesla just for the storage reasons, but I think we’ve been blessed, I guess to have a relationship with Tesla where we have the numerous tires in stock for the different models that we can and we’re staffed 24/7, so we’re not pulling somebody out from the house to come to the shop to get a tire wheel. We’re staffed enough to where we can, we log everything that we have on our shelves with Tesla so they know when they dispatch us to go take care of their customer that we have the tire and the wheel in stock to go to service it and we just pull it off the shelf, put it on the truck, and we’ll dispatch a truck out to take care of the customer.

Laura Dolan:

How easy is Tesla to work with? How accessible are they in an emergency situation? Are they pretty responsive?

Doug Wallace:

Tesla is very, very responsive. Even when you’re having issues to get through the different layers has been relatively pain-free task for us to get the information that we need.

Laura Dolan:

That’s good. That’s good to know.

Shelli Hawkins:

So there are these OEMs out there, so I’ll say there’s Fiskers and Polestar and what else am I missing that are OEMs that exclusively make electric vehicles. They’re not as popular as Tesla and Rivian. And so the tower takes the information that they have and the experience that they have and then of course they’re going to attempt to use that same experience with these vehicles. How should our towing industry react to these one-offs that will be growing in popularity?

Chris Young:

Well, unfortunately EVs are not a homogeneous product. Even within the same brand. You can have three EV models in one OEM and we’re going to take Tesla out of the equation here because Tesla’s really good about homogenizing their product for another big word, making them relatively similar in the handling. So you can have an OEM that has three or four different EV models and the handling on them will be completely different from model to model.

Shelli Hawkins:

So let’s take Ford for example. There’s the Lightning, the Mustang, I’m sorry, the Mach E and then they have other?

Chris Young:

E-Transits.

Shelli Hawkins:

Yeah. How are those to handle?

Chris Young:

They’re problematic in each in their own right. The Mach-E is probably the most involved because they went with the electronic door releases and no door cylinders and no physical key. So the Mach-E is kind of handled the same way as the Teslas where it has the jump leads in the front bumper when it’s dead and you can access the front trunk and it’s really involved to get to the battery. It’s got a bunch of fasteners you’ve got to pop, but the panel comes out almost as easy as a Tesla. You just got to watch the fasteners, make sure you don’t lose them. And then the jumpstart procedure is really straightforward and once you get in the car it’s the shifting for the tow mode is a little bit involved. There’s a certain procedure to it and it’s not the same in the Mach-E as it is in the Lightning. And it’s similar in the Transit because the shifter is the same. It’s that dial shifter they’ve been using in the fusions for a while. So unfortunately it’s not the same across the board.

An environment has been created where the OEMs really, really need to be developing resources and getting them out to the folks that are running trucks because there unfortunately is nothing intuitive about handling an EV.

Shelli Hawkins:

Completely. Yeah, I completely understand and agree. Doug, any experience with these models that he’s talking about?

Doug Wallace:

No, not on firsthand, no.

Chris Young:

You’re lucky.

Shelli Hawkins:

He’s just sitting there absorbing it.

Chris Young:

Yeah, so one unique thing about the Fords is the Fords actually have, and this kind of goes back to the electronic park brake discussion you’re having with Doug. So actually the way tow mode works in most EVs is it’s nothing more than a disengagement of the electronic park break and a means to open the door and not have it default to park, which park again is the application of the parking brake. So the Fords are unique in that they have an electronic park brake, but they also have a park lock similar to a park pole in the electric motors For the time being I’ve been told that’s going to go away. So yeah, so you have that to deal with on the Fords. The tow mode on the Fords is the release of that park lock, and then sometimes you also have to release the electronic park brake, but aside from that, the jump starts on them on the forwards are relatively easy. You can get right to jump leads.

E-Transits, F-150 Lightning still have a mechanical key to enter, still have a mechanical door. So they’re extremely easy to get into. The Ford’s got a mechanical front trunk release. The E-Transit still kind of has a hood because you’re not going to put anything up there. And beyond that it’s just batteries, electric motors and a car shell sitting on top of it.

Laura Dolan:

Can we back up for just a second? You keep mentioning jump starting and I’d just like to know from a logistical point of view, how do you jumpstart an electric vehicle? How do you access the battery or do you need to access the battery?

Chris Young:

I mean, yeah, you need to access a low voltage battery and we have to call it a low voltage battery nowadays because you can’t call it 12 volt because we have Tesla that’s gone 16 volt on lithium ion. They’re about to go 48 volt on Cyber Truck and some other OEMs are going to follow suit with elevated low voltage voltage ratings. So it’s no longer a 12 volt system. It’s now a low voltage system. And I got reminded that in a couple of TikToks. So they got me tuned up really fast on that because I kept misspeaking and it’s something I knew, I just wasn’t saying it correctly. So it’s just a matter of accessing whatever jump points or the battery depending upon what the procedure is. And this is another one of those situations where it’s not a homogeneous event.

On lead acid Teslas, they want you on the battery on lithium ion. They want you on jump posts. On Fords, they want on almost any other manufacturer they want you on remote jump posts. And then you have Rivian that has the jump leads in the back end of the vehicle, which are extremely involved in handling and consume a lot of energy to get the low voltage system back up and running. So yeah, you can jump the low voltage side of the system. It’s not hard to do on most vehicles, but you have to know what the procedure is because like on the F-150 Lightning, there’s direct access to the battery, but they want you on a jump post on Mach E, they don’t mind if you’re on the battery or you got to be on a battery and the ground. They don’t want you on the entire battery. So again, every one of these vehicles is different.

Doug Wallace:

The question is Ford equally, do they share information like Rivian does and Tesla does to get the information to the towers?

Chris Young:

Actually, the Ford information is on Agero’s Blueprint website. So I actually developed all of that information for Agero with Ford and Rivian’s information. I developed most of that for Rivian with Agero. So I’ve been creating Agero’s training content for about 15 years. And it’s funny because only two people in the TikToks have noticed or have recognized me from that. Out of two and a half million views, only two people are like, Hey, that’s the Agero guy. So I don’t know if people know if that exists. So if you’re looking for content on Agero dispatch vehicles or in OEM that Agero services, if you just Google search “Agero blueprint”, you will find a whole catalog of resources there and they are very good resources. It’s high res photos, it’s excellent explanations. It’s 4K video that we’ve shot on location with OEMs. It is a wealth of information there.

Doug Wallace:

Appreciate it.

Chris Young:

Not a problem.

Laura Dolan:

That’s awesome.

Shelli Hawkins:

One other question I thought of was, worst case scenario, these electric vehicles burst into flames. What is the plan? Doug, have you ever experienced that?

Chris Young:

That’s you, Doug.

Doug Wallace:

We have not experienced that. I know it’s coming. We haven’t experienced it yet. There’s lots of conversations right now about, you see a lot of posts on it, and again, social media is your friend and your enemy at the same time, but you see a lot of people that are putting liners in roll off dumpsters and roll off dumpsters and then the conversation goes, how do you get them in there? How do you transfer them from the scene to the yard? Everybody says, “Water, water, water.” There’s some other chemicals that are coming out that they say, we’ll encapsulate and cool and put them out. But I don’t know that there’s lots to talk about it. Parking garages is a big topic right now. If you park one of the airport with one and then it catches on fire, what do they do?

Because they’re not easy to get close to get them out of the parking garage and then the structure damage, then it goes on and on and on. But as far as getting them off the scene, the conversation that we’ve had a lot recently is just getting them off the scene off of an accident and after you get them into the yard, if they catch on fire then, and I think the biggest thing that everybody’s seeing right now is just the containment area is formal. When you bring them into the yard and that’s what we’ve just undergone an expansion on our yard. That’s what we’re going to put into right now. We’re going to put in two containment areas just to park them in case, just in case. But it hasn’t been real prevalent yet. We know it’s coming. We know it’s going to happen. We’re just going to prepare for it.

Shelli Hawkins:

I love that you’re being proactive. That makes me happy.

Laura Dolan:

I actually visited Pro Tow in Columbus, Ohio not too long ago, and Jimmy Whittredge was showing me in their yard, they have a couple of those designated areas where if an electric vehicle catches fire, they basically, and I’ve been told this, they just let them burn. There’s really nothing else that’s going to extinguish it. You just kind let the fire do its thing and then the car kind of just disintegrates from there. But having those designated barriers in the tow yard is basically what allows that to happen. So he had I think three or four of those in his yard and he was like, “Yeah, that’s where we just let the Teslas burn.” I was like, “Oh my gosh. Okay.”

Chris Young:

Was it the containment deal built with those concrete legos?

Laura Dolan:

Yes. Exactly.

Chris Young:

That’s the best way to do it.

Laura Dolan:

Just like cinder block wall.

Chris Young:

Yep. That’s the absolute best way to do it. That whole deal with the converted roll-off dumpster or the C containers, it’s dimensionally, it’s really hard to deal with. And you have all the water you have to figure out how to get rid of. That’s some sort of hazard, hazardous waste, hazardous material. I’m actually a big fan of just letting these things burn out. I mean, I’ve attended a lot of this fire training put on by these bodies that are training in our space and they all kind of have the same opinion that if you just let it burn, the emissions are cleaner and if it just gets fire out of its system just burns itself to death, it’s not going to reignite. And you can pick it up with a shovel and a little bucket and you’re done. Because realistically, once the car catches fire, it’s totaled. So what’s the point?

Laura Dolan:

That was probably done on purpose knowing Tesla and Elon Musk, I’m sure he thought all this through.

Chris Young:

I mean it’s really anything with a battery you don’t want those chemicals near you once the car has been in a fire. And then if you get into the lot, best thing to do is just talk to local fire district and say, “Hey, if anything in this area catches fire, just let it go.” Because I mean, as a property owner, I wouldn’t want that runoff from a electric vehicle fire on my property. I wouldn’t want it in my soil at all and then have to remediate that. No way.

Shelli Hawkins:

Any comment on that Mr. Wallace?

Doug Wallace:

No, I mean it kind goes back to the previous podcast that you guys had. They’re talking about once you start talking about remediation in the property damage that’s going to create or even the re-ignition of it. That’s kind of the first time that I’ve heard that where you just let it burn. I mean, I think that’s the best advice that I’ve heard so far. But I mean it also gets into the situation too that if you do put it out and they are able to cool it off, now you’ve got this battery that’s volatile and there is no coverage. Who’s going to bear the burden of disposal on that? Should it be the tower? I mean, that opens a whole other can of worms there, but letting it burn down, there’s nothing left. That’s the problem. Pretty much took care of itself.

Chris Young:

It’s interesting, I sat through a training session up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I drove up there, buddy of mine owns a towing company up there, and I went up there to attend that just for the sake of going seeing him. And the Vermilion, I think it was Vermilion, South Dakota Police Department was at that training and within about a week they had a Tesla fire and their assessment was that they were going to mitigate fire around the vehicle and let the thing burn down.

Laura Dolan:

Do you know what caused it?

Chris Young:

Who knows? It wasn’t a collision or anything. It was probably a battery defect.

Laura Dolan:

See, that’s scarier. I was like, please don’t let it be a battery defect.

Chris Young:

No, actually what happened was, in retrospect, the car through a fault and they pulled over and they smelt something and then the guy was petrified to get out of the car and just opened the door and jumped out of it and jumped as far away from the car as he could, thinking something was going to happen, nothing’s going to happen, but it just threw a fault and then it was on, being the fire.

Laura Dolan:

Wow, that’s scary.

Chris Young:

But now let me back up. When I say about letting these things burn down, if they’re in an open area, I’m all for letting a car burn down. If you have one in a structure and you have a structure in peril, then I think the fire department needs to get in there and do something to mitigate a complete loss of a structure if they can. Even if it’s something as simple as knocking the windows out of it and throwing some J chains, because the departments around here have got J chains on trucks so they can feasibly if they can get to it, knock windows out of cars, hook the pillars, and with an engine drag it out of a structure.

Laura Dolan:

While it’s burning, you mean?

Chris Young:

Yeah, but I mean, if you have one in a parking structure, you almost have to go fight that because if you have a post tension floor above it and you compromise the post tension floor above that car, you can have a collapse of the structure. So I mean, if you have one in a parking structure, you absolutely have to fight that thing. You have to do everything you can to cool it down.

Shelli Hawkins:

And Doug, how closely do you guys work with and know all your local fire departments? It’s crucial.

Doug Wallace:

Fairly close. We’ve got a fairly good relationship with all the local municipalities in our area within our county.

Shelli Hawkins:

Law enforcement, fire, everything?

Doug Wallace:

Yes. And there’s been lots of conversations kind of on this thing, but I think it’s probably another area that we should probably focus more on, especially with the popularity of the cars in the area. But we’ll be done, I’m sure in the foreseeable future with our local. It’s on the forefront right now, I guess.

Shelli Hawkins:

Right. So I’m going to ask one more question. I’m going to ask the question and then I’m going to tell you how I would answer it to give you guys some time to kind of think about it. So I want Doug and Chris to weigh in on this, but my question is this: If you had the opportunity to sit around the boardroom table as these electric vehicles are getting engineered, like this is the very beginning of the model 2026, whatever the case it was, is there anything specific, not just in the design, in the communication, in the whole process that you would ask of these folks that are making electric vehicles, whether it’s an OEM that specifically makes electric vehicles only, or another OEM that has electric vehicles in their lineup, what would you ask of them? And for me, it would be just to have a portal somehow for the towing industry to access the information of their vehicles. Any comments over there, Doug and Chris?

Chris Young:

Go for it, Doug.

Shelli Hawkins:

I have one more thing. What about having training with the folks that are in their network and contract to do it? Just having an annual training of here’s what’s coming out with our 2004 models, here’s some changes, here’s how to address it properly. Maybe here’s some different ways to maneuver it, etc.

Doug Wallace:

For me, I think that’s what I’d look for is just the ability to get to the information that we need and sharing the information. And some of these ones that I talked about that we see on a day-to-day, I feel like they’ve done a really, really good job sharing that information. And it sounds to me like the Ford information, like Chris was talking, the information’s out there, you just kind of order to find it. It’d be nice if it’s kind of standard to where the EVs had kind of a platform to where the information was all shared in one spot where we’d have access to it. So there was three o’clock in the morning and you’re in a situation that you’d have a portal or the ability to find the information that you need to get to.

But that’d be my biggest thing is that, and I go back to just the ability to get them to roll, to be able to be mobile when the systems are down, I think is the biggest thing that we get into on these. But the information’s probably more important to me than that would be. If we can get anything out of the manufacturers, it’d be to have that information readily available to the tower.

Chris Young:

The good news, Doug, is that that portal’s coming. I’m working on that. I’m working on that personally. So I have actually been in some discussions with OEMs on a couple different EV models prior to launch. One of them before the thing even had a name. And getting an opinion on roadside past an engineer or designer that is bent on their design is really, really difficult. A lot of them view roadside as nothing more than every vehicle rolls on level ground on asphalt. And everything’s a perfect scenario. And it’s really difficult because when I go in and do an assessment on a vehicle, I’m going into a room that’s filled with positive attitudes and I have to bring bad news and I have to calculate how I’m going to deliver that and the personalities in the room and who’s going to get offended.

I can walk past cars in a parking lot walking into a restaurant, and I can see roadside complications in every vehicle in a parking lot. I have an innate ability to look at vehicle platforms and see where a design is going to fall down. And it’s sometimes hard to break that news and engineers don’t want to hear, especially on EVs, that their design’s going to fail. No engineer ever believes their design’s going to fail until launch and there’s a massive failure. So unfortunately, those conversations have to be had.

I guess with OEMs, my one wish is for participation. Participate in the development of resources, preferably funded as well, but just participate, answer the question that need to be asked, make the vehicles available and allow for resources to be developed. Because a lot of these OEMs are relying on their networks because their networks have represented themselves as the industry experts. And if you look inside a network, there’s not a whole lot of folks in there with towing experience. If you look in Tesla’s network, there’s guys in there with towing experience and it’s one of the reasons why Tesla’s network is so well run and it performs so well. So participation is the one thing. If I had to ask for one thing, it’s participation. Just give us the information, give us access to cars, let us produce it, and let us get it to the operators that have to handle these vehicles.

Shelli Hawkins:

Great, great.

Laura Dolan:

Sage advice.

Chris Young:

Is that too many times for stating participation?

Shelli Hawkins:

No. I like that. Participation!

Laura Dolan:

You can make a drinking game out of it just like when Shelli says, “Fantastic”.

Shelli Hawkins:

Fantastic.

Chris Young:

Splendid.

Laura Dolan:

Oh, there you go. Another keyword. Awesome. This has been fascinating, gentlemen. We’ve taken up enough of your time. Shelli, anything else you wanted to say before we wrap up? Or Doug or Chris, anything that we didn’t cover that you’d like to sneak in before we sign off for the rest of the year?

Shelli Hawkins:

I’m good. I’m good. I’m just so grateful that Doug and Chris were able to join us. I think the world of both of you guys, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge today, generally speaking. And Laura, like she said, she’s going to put all the information down in the notes of the podcast how you folks can get in touch with these gentlemen.

Laura Dolan:

Well, thank you gentlemen again so much. Thank you, Shelli. And this will conclude the last podcast of 2023. Happy holidays everybody. Have a wonderful time with your friends and family as you wrap up the year, and we will certainly see you back again next year in 2024.

Shelli Hawkins:

Indeed. Be safe everybody. Thanks so much. We’ll see you next year.

Laura Dolan:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the TRAXERO On-The-Go podcast. For more episodes, go to traxero.com/podcast and to find out more about how we can hook your towing business up with our towing management software and impound yard solutions, please visit traxero.com or go to the contact page linked at the bottom of this podcast blog.

Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay