Your Favorite Tow Truck Manufacturers?

Thanks for your interest - I'll answer your question to the best of my abilities.

I'd say, first off, one of, if not the, most important aspects of buying a wrecker is dealer availability. Included in that is 1. the distance to the dealer from your company's location, 2. the size of the dealer, 3. the professionalism of the dealer, and 4. ease of access to dealer provided parts.

I'll detail those in order:

1. Try to use a dealer/dealers as near to you as possible - even if your local dealer(s) don't have the unit you need, and you're forced to purchase a unit from a dealer farther away, I'd suggest sticking with manufacturers that have a solid dealer network local to you, that way getting parts or repairs done is easier and less time and money consuming.

2. Pay close attention to the size of the dealer you're considering - if they're only building one or two units a year, and have little or no stock units, either the dealer or the particular manufacturer they represent are not popular in your area.

3. The quality of the customer service is also very important - if the employees of the dealer are very unpleasant, or jerk you around on getting parts and repairs, you should absolutely move on to another dealer. They are there to service you.

4. Another very major issue is ease of getting parts - stick with major manufacturers, and ones that are popular in your area. I would avoid beds manufactured overseas; they may be slightly cheaper to begin with, but as most towing companies keep wreckers for many years, parts availability will quickly become a problem. It defeats the purpose of saving a little money at the original purchase when, after a couple years, a wrecker ends up sitting in the shop unusable while you wait for months on parts to be imported, or, worse yet, not being able to get parts at all and having to either have custom parts locally made or rebuild the entire unit or scrap it.

5. What your drivers prefer is also a deciding factor; if you buy equipment that drivers don't like operating, then either they'll end up damaging it, or they'll go to another company with more preferable equipment.

I'll give a quick personal example that covers these points: currently our fleets consist mainly of Miller and Jerr-Dan units. We have several dealers of both fairly local, with one dealer for each company being about the same distance away (about an hour and a half). We are currently purchasing only Jerr-Dan units, mainly because they seem to be on the cutting edge of towing technology and in touch with what customers want, and also our local dealer is fairly large and easy to deal with. On the other hand, Miller seems to be falling a bit behind, and our local dealer has gotten very small over the past several years; they're still nice to deal with, but have very little, if anything, in stock at any given time, and as with point 2 above, obviously something is going on.

We've also strongly considered NRC Industries, who are based in Quebec: they build very nice heavy duty wreckers and all sizes of rollback, but the closest dealer to us is several hours away, is very small, and there are almost no companies anywhere locally, or even in the entire Southern portion of the USA (we're in North Carolina), that use them. Presumably because the dealer network is non-existent.

So, basically, we currently stick with Jerr-dan, of which we've bought 6 of over the past several years - 3 MPL-40 autoloaders and 3 XLP rollbacks, all of which have worked very well for us. We plan to continue to stay with Jerr-dan for our future units, whether it's a small wrecker, heavy wrecker, rotator, or rollback.

Also, we stick with Ford and Kenworth chassis.

All that of course is based on my preferences and opinions, and those of our drivers.

That's all my personal opinions and experiences there, but that's what I've got, and I hope it helps!