Towlos: The trailer you need, when you need it | Articles

If you’re reading this, that means you live in our world: the world of tracks and autocrosses and project cars and doing cool stuff with combinations of those things.

It also means you either have a trailer or at some point will need a trailer.

It’s inevitable. Given a long enough time frame, your need for a trailer approaches 100%–and by “long enough,” we mean “probably even couple of months.”

But trailer ownership isn’t for everyone. Legally speaking, a trailer is basically a car that can’t move itself. It’s subject to registration and licensing fees, needs to be stored and maintained with nontrivial things like brakes and tires, and requires a whole other vehicle just to move it somewhere. Plus, you have to buy the thing to begin with.

Still, you’re going to need one at some point. There’ll be an event you want to get to that requires more gear than your Miata can swallow, or you’ll want to turn a track weekend into a longer trip, or your car will break, or you’ll buy a car that someone else broke for pennies on the dollar.

We don’t need to bullet-point every reason for a trailer, because you already know them, and if you don’t have one, it’s only because you’ve structured your life–whether through intention or luck–so that you haven’t needed one … yet.

But–refer to a previous paragraph here–you will.

And that’s where Towlos comes in. Trailer rental is nothing new. U-Haul and local outfits have been renting trailers for decades. But where Towlos comes in is in streamlining the process and applying some successful strategies from other marketplaces to make renting a trailer less of a burden and more of a useful, productive service.

Basically, Towlos applies the peer-to-peer model of companies like Airbnb or Vrbo to trailer rental. Business is conducted through the Towlos app or the online portal, where local options can be compared and priced out right on your computer or smartphone. After you find what you need, you can reserve it with the click of a button and, in most cases, even pick it up in a zero-contact fashion and be on your way with zero drama.

And yes, even we need more trailers sometimes. When a press loan vehicle recently showed up unexpectedly, we needed to get it to Circuit Florida for a full slate of VBox-instrumented testing. Unfortunately, we had little idea it was arriving until it actually showed up, and all of our trailers were either loaded with immobile husks (a not uncommon occurrence this time of year in our world) or undergoing some offseason maintenance.

So we registered for Towlos, which had previously bought a few ads on our website. Apparently those ads worked, because they got us interested, and we found a perfect 20-foot flatbed car hauler just a few minutes away from our home base.

All of this was by design, according to Towlos founder Matt Jones. The idea was born from Jones’ own track exploits and needing to haul his Corvette to track events once in a while to ensure that something dumb, like a nail in a tire, didn’t ruin his entire weekend that he sunk a lot of money, time and effort into making happen.

Coincidentally, that’s the same reason we tow all of our test cars to the track. We devote several hours and at least two or sometimes three employees to a track test day to drive, shoot photos and videos, and log data. One nail in the tire wastes all those people’s time and makes the story that much more difficult to produce.

And when a Mazda MX-5 showed up unexpectedly and we found ourselves without an available company trailer, we made a Towlos account.

Similar to Airbnb, Towlos listings detail the type of trailer you’re renting, pickup protocols, location, whether the pickup is self-serve contactless or someone will meet you, and, of course, the cost. We nabbed our 20-foot hauler from Volker Schwartz, whose available stock includes this flatbed hauler plus another, a few car-sized enclosed trailers and some smaller utility trailers.

Volker will meet you at his lot in Bunnell, Florida, and walk you through every feature of the trailer you’re renting (while you’re there, ask him about tuning diesel engines for the Bonneville Salt Flats to go 400+ mph). Or he’ll stay away, keep the entire pickup process online and let you grab the trailer any time of day or night.

Volker says meeting in person comes down to the renter’s preference. Of course, we wanted to meet because we’re writing about it, but it was also nice to hear his story and see how cleanly all of his trailers are set up.

The 20-foot, steel-framed, wood-decked car hauler that we rented was probably overkill for a Miata, but it still towed like a dream. Volker supplies a large assortment of clean, new-looking tie-downs in a variety of configurations with wheel and axle straps, hooks, hook extenders and hard points that attach to the trailer at different points.

Basically, every single thing you’d ever need to tie literally anything to this trailer was neatly organized and tucked into the storage compartment of a very clean trailer. After a quick walk-around, hookup and farewell, we headed back home to load the MX-5 and head to Circuit Florida.

We’ll skip the towing part because it was uneventful and boring, which is the absolute highest compliment we can ever pay to a tow. The rig towed behind my Tundra as smoothly as our aluminum trailer, and every single feature worked as designed.

When we were done, the Mazda was unloaded, and the straps were neatly rolled up and tucked into their container once again–no way we were going to give it back any worse than we got it–we dropped it back at Volker’s lot Sunday morning, locked the keys in the attached strongbox, and were on our way. Cost for a Friday morning pickup and use of the trailer through the end of day on Sunday was just over $400, including taxes and service fees.

You’re probably wondering how far the Airbnb comparison goes. Well, a long way, as YOUR trailer can also be turned into an available rental. Of course, it and you will have to go through some vetting, but now your trailer, which mostly does nothing, can earn its keep instead of just providing shade for a growing number of squirrels to sleep under.

Like Airbnb hosts, trailer hosts can offer their unused trailer for rent and provide as simple or as elaborate a service to their renters or “guests” as they like. Renters do go through a vetting process as well to minimize risk, but you’re also getting paid for a trailer that would otherwise just be sitting there.

Anyway, back to us. Our experience was fairly seamless. Volker was awesome to work with even before he knew who we were, and the trailer and accessories were all top-notch. Honestly. They were maybe even nicer than most of our stuff–certainly better stored and organized than most of our stuff–which gives us some tailer goals for the rest of our short offseason.

Would we do it again if we had the need? Yeah, in a heartbeat. A few clicks on your device, and there’s a trailer waiting for you. It could hardly be easier.

Downsides? Just a few. As a relatively new service, some areas aren’t particularly well populated with available offerings that might suit your needs. Time and exposure should cure this mostly, but for now if you’re in a small market you just need to hope for the best and spread the word. Also, there’s no real way to book a one-way trip, which is something that folks in our world frequently have need for. But because many of these trailers are privately owned by individuals or small businesses, that makes perfect sense.

So, overall, this is going to be our new go-to when our trailers can’t make the haul. At $400, give or take, for what amounts to a long weekend rental, we could do a LOT of those before we ever justified the price of even buying another trailer, let alone maintaining and storing it.

You could say that Towlos hitched us up and pulled us over to its way of thinking. But that would be lame and hacky. Suffice it to say that the company took a successful model and applied it to something we can directly benefit from, making a frequently frustrating operation orders of magnitude simpler. Even without a clever metaphor, that’s a win in our book.

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