Why we won’t change your tire on the side of the road
Let’s start with the answer, because if you’re reading this next to a flat, you don’t want a lecture — you want to know what we can do for you. So here it is, plain and simple: we don’t change tires. But we’ll gladly load you up and take you to a shop that will.
I know. You called a tow company, you’ve got a flat, and a tow truck can seemingly do anything — so why on earth won’t we just swap the thing and send you on your way?
It’s a fair question. And there are three reasons. It comes down to keeping people alive, not wasting your time, and not handing you a bigger headache than the one you woke up with.
The shoulder of the road is the most dangerous place we work
Most folks assume the danger in this line of work is the heavy equipment — the winches, the weight of it all. It isn’t. It’s the traffic.
Towing, it turns out, is one of the deadliest jobs in the country. The CDC pegs the fatality rate for tow operators at around 43 deaths per 100,000 workers — roughly fifteen times higher than the average across every other private industry combined. Let that sink in for a second. Nearly 350 people a year are struck and killed while standing outside a disabled vehicle on the side of the road, and about one tow operator is killed every six days. These aren’t just statistics to us. They’re the reason “Slow Down, Move Over” is practically a prayer in this business.
And here’s the part that matters for your flat: the danger isn’t the tire. It’s standing out there long enough to deal with it. AAA found that nearly 89% of roadside worker deaths happen where the speed limit is 55 or higher, and 63% happen in the dark. That’s I-40 and I-17 after sundown — our stretch of the world. Changing a tire means one of our people crouched down at your wheel, on the traffic side, for ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes longer if a lug decides to be stubborn. Loading you onto the flatbed and getting off that shoulder? Often quicker — and it gets everybody out of harm’s way instead of parking somebody in it.
We’re a family business. Three generations of us have worked these roads, and I’d like to keep every one of them in one piece, thank you very much. That’s not a small thing around here.
Arizona actually has a law about this, in case it never came up. It’s the “Move Over” law (ARS 28-775), and since 2011 it’s required drivers to move over a lane, or slow way down, for any vehicle sitting on the shoulder with its flashers on — yes, including your stranded car. Good law. The trouble is, plenty of drivers either don’t know it or can’t be bothered, so we don’t stake our people’s lives on the kindness of strangers doing 80.
Half the time, there’s nothing to put on anyway
Now, even if changing a tire roadside were perfectly safe — it isn’t, but even if — we’d hit a wall on a good number of these calls. There’s simply no decent spare to bolt on.
You’d be amazed how often. These days about 30% of new cars don’t even come with a spare tire — the automakers quietly stopped including them to shave off weight and squeeze out a little better gas mileage. Back in 2006, it was only 5%. AAA figures there are now more than 30 million cars out on the road with no spare at all, and in a single year they answered over 450,000 calls from drivers who went looking for theirs and came up empty-handed. Rental cars are notorious for it — a lot of them carry nothing but a little inflator kit, and I’ll tell you, those rarely fix anything worse than a nail.
And when there is a spare? Well. Half the time it’s been bolted up underneath the vehicle for the better part of a decade, caked in road grime and salt, and it will not come down without a fight. Or it drops loose and it’s dry-rotted, or flat itself, or the wrong size altogether. Most people have never once thought to check their spare — and honestly, why would they? — so nobody finds out the bad news until they’re already stuck.
If your tire’s damaged, it has to be repaired or replaced at a shop regardless. A spare — even a good one — is a temporary donut meant to limp you to that shop and no farther. So towing you straight there isn’t us giving you the runaround. It’s the actual fix, minus the detour and the donut.
Doing it wrong makes it your problem — and our fault
This last one matters whether you drive one car or run a whole fleet of them, so stick with me.
Modern vehicles are particular. Manufacturers publish specific jack points and specific lug-nut torque values, and they are not the same from one make to the next. Put the jack in the wrong spot and you can crease a rocker panel or bend something you shouldn’t. Get the lug torque wrong — too loose, or cranked down too tight — and you’re looking at a warped brake rotor down the line, or, God forbid, a wheel that works itself loose and comes off at highway speed forty miles later.
We are not going to sit on the shoulder of the interstate pulling up factory torque specs and jack-point diagrams for every make and model that rolls up. Nobody can do that safely in the few minutes you’ve got. And if we winged it, and it went wrong later, that wouldn’t just be your problem — it’d be on us. We’d rather tell you the honest truth than fake our way through a job with your safety riding on it.
A shop has the lift, the torque wrench, the specs, and the good light to do it right the first time. So that, friend, is where your car belongs.
So here’s what we’ll actually do for you
You call. You tell us where you are and what you’re driving. We come out, load you up, and take you to a shop that’ll fix that tire the right way. No standing around in traffic, no gambling on a mystery spare, no crossing our fingers with anyone’s safety.
It was never that we can’t change a tire. It’s that after more than fifty years of doing this, we know the smartest, safest thing we can do for you is get you off that shoulder and into the hands of someone who’ll do the job right.
Flat tire? Call United Towing at 928-526-1839, and we’ll get you where you need to go.