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Tow a car 1K miles
bigpanda
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Yes, 1,000 miles.
My girlfriend was borrowing her father's truck, wrecked it and can't afford to have it fixed. Her father is willing to fix it but there is no place for him to do the repairs here and for other personal reasons I'd rather have it shipped/towed back to her father.
Has anyone had experience having a non-running car shipped/towed approximately 1,000 miles? The truck would run if the front end wasn't toast. The radiator is wrecked along with headlights/grill and I'm unable to get the hood open from the damage. I'm trying to figure out how much this would cost to have it towed to him?
My girlfriend was borrowing her father's truck, wrecked it and can't afford to have it fixed. Her father is willing to fix it but there is no place for him to do the repairs here and for other personal reasons I'd rather have it shipped/towed back to her father.
Has anyone had experience having a non-running car shipped/towed approximately 1,000 miles? The truck would run if the front end wasn't toast. The radiator is wrecked along with headlights/grill and I'm unable to get the hood open from the damage. I'm trying to figure out how much this would cost to have it towed to him?
bigpanda on
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Probably have to have it put on a flatbed.
If not, then all you'd need is one of these
Probably a lot cheaper than shipping, too.
note I'm not saying to rent them from uhaul, I just used their site cause it was the first to pop up on my searches
You should probably explore other options. Some ideas:
Rent your girlfriends father a storage garage for 2 months for maybe $300-400 so he has a place to work on the truck.
Hire a garage to fix the mechanical problems with the truck and forego the bodywork until you can drive the thing down under its own power.
If you have AAA, you might be able to negotiate some kind of towing arrangement with them. Typically the time for this would have been at the scene of the accident, but who knows? AAA has always been very accommodating to me in the past. Best case scenario: they let you use all 3 of your yearly 150 mile tows at once, but you're still liable for the other 550 miles. Not a pretty scenario but probably still cheaper than the alternatives.
If it were me, I might just buy a "rusty but runs well" truck and dolly for maybe $2-3k, make the trip, and then resell them. Your initial outlay would be much higher, but you could recoup most of that investment afterwords, assuming your new truck didn't break down en route... Since you're asking this question, though, I assume you don't have a lot of experience towing vehicles or probably towing any kind of trailer at all: a 1000 mile trip isn't exactly an ideal first lesson in what can be a dangerous discipline, so I certainly wouldn't recommend this course of action to you personally. Perhaps if you had a more knowledgeable/experienced partner/friend, this might be an option, though.
One last thing to remember: if you do decide to rent/borrow/buy/steal a transport vehicle and make this journey using a tow dolly (the kind of device where the front wheels sit above the ground and the rear wheels roll on the ground), and the truck in question is a rear or four-wheel-drive vehicle, I have heard conflicting accounts as to whether the rear driveshaft should be removed prior to long-distance transport. One school of thought is that, although the transmission can be placed in neutral, the wheels will still spin the driveshaft which will spin a portion of the internal workings of the transmission: this might not be a problem except, the vehicle not being running, there is no mechanism for circulating the cooling and lubricating transmission fluid, resulting in potential transmission damage.
The other school of thought is, "thats dumb, there is plenty of fluid to lubricate everything, and not much heat is generated just spinning the tail end of a tranny: the only reason it gets hot ordinarily is because it has to PUSH the car"
I really have no idea which of these opinions are correct. If it were me I'd probably remove the driveshaft just to save a bit of wear on the transmission, and just in case. Or else I'd spend some time with Google and try to puzzle out a definitive answer.
Either way, good luck!
I've never towed anything before and all I have is a civic hybrid which isn't going to tow a Chevy Blazer. Concern #2 is that it'd be going from Seattle to Montana so we're talking several mountain passes and icy conditions.
I checked some moving sites and have gotten two quotes so far, one for $500 the other for $700. I'll talk to em tomorrow and see what I can figure out. Worst case scenario is that we might have to take Pel's advice and rent a storage unit so he can work on the truck.
It's definitely a thing on a 4WD vehicle -- the transfer case needs circulating lube for any sort of operation, but the lube pump generally runs off the input shaft. If the transfer case has a neutral setting, then your problem is solved, but a lot of the newer electronically controlled ones don't.
Correct. Check the owners manual for towing tips - the majority of Blazers can't be towed unless you put the transfer case in neutral/disconnect the driveshaft
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This is generally the case on RWD only vehicles as well.
The rule of thumb is keep the drive wheels off the ground or risk transmission damage
A 4WD/AWD vehicle is best towed on a full trailer
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Alternatively, if her dad is willing to get it fixed, why not have him send her the money and get it fixed where it is, and then drive it back to him? That would probably be cheaper in the long run.
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