TowingBossPro Blog — Driver App & Routes

Before-Hookup Photos: The Tow Driver's Best Defense in a Damage Dispute

The phone rings two days after a tow. The customer says the rear bumper was not cracked when you picked the car up. Your driver remembers it was, but memory is not evidence. A photo is.

The prior article, Access Notes That Save a Tow Driver Twenty Minutes in a Parking Garage, was about reaching the vehicle. Once you are there, the first thing before the hookup should be the walk-around and the photos.

Why Before, Not After

Photos taken after the tow show the car on your lot or at the shop. They cannot prove what the car looked like before your equipment touched it. Before-hookup photos can. That is the whole value: they show condition at the moment your company took responsibility.

In the TowingBossPro driver app, the driver takes vehicle photos on the call and they stay with that call.

That also keeps photos off personal phones, which is better for everyone. When a driver leaves the company, the photos from their calls stay with the company. When the office gets the phone call two days later, the photos are on the call record, not on the driver's personal camera roll.

The Walk-Around Shot List

Speed matters on a busy day, so keep a fixed routine:

• Front, rear, and both sides, full vehicle in frame
• Each corner at an angle, where most bumper damage shows
• Any existing damage, close up
• Wheels and tires if any look damaged or flat
• Plate in frame at least once, so the photos are tied to the vehicle

That is eight to ten photos and a minute or two. Do it the same way every time and it becomes automatic.

Good light matters more than more photos. At night, use the work lights or a flashlight to light the panel you are shooting instead of relying on the flash, which tends to wash out scratches and dents. In rain, wipe the lens. A blurry photo of a bumper proves nothing.

After the Hookup Too

Before photos protect you from damage that was already there. A couple of photos after the vehicle is secured, and again at drop-off, show it arrived the way it left. For impound and storage drops, a photo on arrival at the lot shows condition at the start of storage.

Drop-off photos are especially worth it at after-hours drops, when nobody from the shop is there to sign off. A shot of the car parked where they asked closes the loop.

Accident Scenes

On Accident and Recovery calls, photos do double duty. They document the condition of the vehicle and the scene as you found it. Keep the shots focused on the vehicle you are recovering and stay out of the way of anyone working the scene. Rules about what can be photographed at an accident scene vary, so check local requirements and follow direction from whoever is in charge on scene.

Making Drivers Actually Do It

Drivers skip photos when they are rushed, when it is raining and when it is 2am. The office can help by checking calls when they come back complete: a call with no photos gets a reminder. After a week or two the habit sticks, especially once a driver sees a photo end an argument that would otherwise have cost the company money.

Explain the why. Drivers do not like paying for damage they did not cause any more than owners do.

It also helps to keep the shot list the same for every driver. When everyone shoots front, rear, sides and corners in the same order, anyone in the office can look at a set of photos and know right away if something is missing.

Using the Photos Later

When a dispute comes in, pull up the call, look at the before photos with the customer or the shop, and walk through them. Most disputes end there. When they do not, you at least have clear records of what your driver saw.

Photos also help the office in less tense ways: confirming which vehicle was towed, showing a commercial account the condition of a unit, or checking whether a flat tire was already flat.

They help the next driver as well. When a vehicle that has been sitting on your lot needs to move again for a transport, the earlier photos show what condition it was in when it came in.

For more on what the driver app does on each call, see the Tow Truck Driver App page.