Takeaways Gathered by Directly Asking Tow Operators and Agencies What They Really Need

🔎In this article: Towing operators and agencies from different regions, business sizes, and roles consistently pointed to the same needs: less complexity, greater visibility, and tools that remove everyday friction. Here's what those conversations revealed and how those insights influence the technology we build.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." – attributed to Henry Ford

Henry Ford probably never said that, but the century old quote has lasted because it captures something every product person eventually learns from discussions with end-users: people will passionately share their problem, yet when you ask them to imagine a solution, they tend to describe the tool they already use with just one currently missing feature added. They’re saying they just need a bigger folder, another screen, or... essentially, a faster horse. The lesson? Build only what customers ask for, and you’ll spend your career shipping faster horses.

For a while now, our Autura team has taken a different approach. We’ve been working to listen to requests and build technology that solves for the need behind the ask. Our product team spends time in tow yards and dispatch offices and on video calls that run long because we want users of our software to have someone listening. Someone who wants to hear how their work really gets done.  

We sit with operators who use our software, those who run someone else's, and a few who are limping along on tools that no longer exist on a price sheet. We do this not for a highlight reel of satisfied customers, but to build an honest map of industry needs so we can modernize technology faster.

As part of this process, I’ve had the privilege to observe patterns emerging from these conversations that no single encounter would ever reveal. Today, I’m sharing a few consistent takeaways from these valuable discussions.  

The Surprise Takeaway: We Want Less

Heading into user conversations, my team expects a wish list, maybe naming more:  

• Automation  
• Integrations
• Dashboards
• And everything the technology press insists every business now demands.  

And with all the noise around artificial intelligence, we expected towing operators to want AI packed into their towing management software, too. Instead, the strongest and most consistent signal has pointed the other way. We are hearing that towing business owners and operators actually want less.

For example:  

• Adrian, who runs a busy multi-truck operation in Louisiana, KY, did not ask for more features. Instead, he wants a single system reachable from any device, including the Mac on his desk. And he wants technology that cuts busy work. Something with the power to bill a whole month of customers in a single pass instead of one at a time, and keep several calls open at once without losing his place.  
• Anthony, who handles 175-350 calls a day across sixty-odd trucks and two dozen New Jersey police departments, requested similar, small mercies, like letting a customer's photos drop straight onto the call, and taking a payment with a tap.  
• Ryan, who runs a heavy-duty outfit in Ohio, plainly asked if we could pull the friction out of the work he already does.  

Different operations, varied sizes, distinct geographic regions covered – all with a similar ask.

These operators aren’t afraid of technology. Most have run the same yards for decades and have quickly adopted digital dispatch, mobile payments, and GPS tracking. But they’re sharing that friction is still present – like the small daily tax of hopping between screens and re-keying the same information twice in multiple, disconnected places.  

That friction is much harder to engineer out of technology than raw capability. Adding a feature is easy; the real work is cutting down painful steps that are part of our users’ daily lives. And that’s exactly the kind of work we’re taking on.

Government leaders we work with are sharing a similar version of the same story... just using a different dialect. Instead of simplicity, they speak about control and accountability. The need for the right people to see the right information for a clean record of who did what and when.  

Beneath that language sits the identical need the operators are voicing: make the complicated part of work disappear while enhancing visibility and efficiency. They are saying: Do that, and you’ll earn my trust.

The Truth Takeaway: No One’s Afraid of Robots

The way work reaches a towing company is changing quickly. For years, dispatchers answered the phone. Now the largest breakdown and roadside networks are moving toward routing calls automatically, sending each one to whichever provider ranks highest for speed, documentation, and clean paperwork. Being the go-to towing operation in your region used to run on relationships, but increasingly it’s based more on numbers.  

In conversations with towing and recovery teams, we consistently heard that operators are pulling that future toward them rather than pushing it away.  

For example:

• Clay, in Charlotte, NC, wants AI answering his inbound calls (his father is a harder sell)
• Ryan, another Operator we spoke with, joked that if it were up to his old man, they would still be dragging chains.  
• Adrian, only half kidding, asked us to build an AI version of his own brain; something that could read a call and point to the closest, right tow driver for the job exactly the way he does now, on instinct.  

The people betting on the future of this industry largely grew up in the business and now run it. None of them want the towing industry to slow down. They do want a provider of tools ready for whatever the networks decide to measure next. That’s what Autura is striving to be for these business owners.

The Consistent Takeaway: Same Shift from Different Perspectives

Government agency leaders have technology needs for supporting municipal towing needs, too.  

To an agency, a pileup on the interstate is a single event: one scene to manage and, ideally, safely oversee. To the towing operator who takes the call, that scene splits into separate vehicles, each with its own driver, rigging, and safest path off the road. Both views are correct. What everyone involved needs is software that can support the needs of both responsible parties without forcing manual reconciliation and rework during and in the aftermath.  

The stakes are real. For public safety agencies, a vehicle sitting unaccounted for is a liability with a timeclock running. For a towing operator, an accident scene that towing management software cannot capture cleanly becomes an argument three weeks later with an insurer, a customer, or a city that sets the rate by contract.  

More screens and extra features don’t fix this. What will is a centralized, connected system that paints a clear picture of incident management and towing program activity – from every perspective. That's precisely what we are building.

How Takeaways Inform What We Build

The conversations referenced above and all the others we’ve had this year naturally include feature and functionality requests. Some we can fulfill right away. Others will take more consideration. Beyond these asks, though, there are deeper discussions about better ways to carry out work.  

When we hear an operator asks for three minor changes that each save a step, we are training ourselves to understand that the job has too many steps in the first place. When an agency pushes for tighter user permissions, we are training our ear to understand their concern is trust, and they’re asking us to help them see and understand agency roles, responsibilities, and ownership. Our work is to hear the ask, find the underlying need, and build software that delivers.

Engineering exactly what someone asked for is safe. It demos well and makes the first requestors happy. But quickly, you’ll find yourself in a cycle of changing font colors and button shapes, building custom report dashboards that only serve certain customers, and rarely solving real, pervasive problems.  

We sometimes have to tell good people no, since the best answer to "give me this button" is actually a better product that never needed the button in the first place.  

When we get it wrong (and we do), the miss sends us back to the tow yards, asking deeper, harder questions. That loop, more than any single feature, is why operators who have watched other vendors come and go keep betting on Autura. We are not in the business of building a faster horse. We want to know where you are trying to go, and we want to be the ones who take you there.