Electric Vehicle Recovery: What EV Drivers in Glasgow Need to Know

Electric vehicles now make up a meaningful share of what we recover around Glasgow, and they break down differently enough that it is worth knowing the rules before you need them.

The short version: an EV almost always needs a flatbed, it cannot be towed on its driven wheels, and running flat is far more common than any mechanical fault.

Running out of charge

This is the most frequent EV call out by a distance, and it is not really a breakdown at all.

An EV that reaches zero cannot be topped up at the roadside the way a petrol car can with a can of fuel. Mobile charging units exist but are rare, slow and not something you can rely on being nearby. In practice, a flat EV gets transported to a charger.

The good news is that it is a simple job. The car is intact, it rolls and steers, and it goes on a flatbed to the nearest suitable rapid charger or to your home charger. Tell us which you want when you call, and tell us the state of charge if the car will still report it, because a car with a genuine zero behaves differently from one showing a few percent.

Worth knowing: most EVs hold a small reserve below the displayed zero, and running that reserve down repeatedly is not good for the pack. If you are watching the range collapse on a cold motorway, slowing to sixty and turning off the cabin heat will buy you real distance. Cold weather can take a quarter or more off usable range, which catches out drivers every January.

Why an EV must not be towed

This is the rule that matters most, and it is the one that gets broken.

The motors in an electric car are permanently connected to the driven wheels. There is no clutch and no neutral in the sense a petrol car has one. Turning those wheels with the car off spins the motor, and a spinning motor generates current. Feeding uncontrolled current back into a high voltage system that is not awake to receive it can damage the inverter and the motor, and it will invalidate the warranty on most manufacturers.

So: no rope tows, no partial lift with the driven wheels down, no rolling it any real distance. Four wheels on a deck, or dollies and skates under the driven axle for short repositioning only.

The same applies to hybrids with electric drive on one axle, and to a lot of modern petrol cars with automatic gearboxes for different reasons.

Twelve volt batteries still exist

Something that surprises new EV owners: almost every electric car still has an ordinary twelve volt lead acid or lithium battery under the bonnet or in the boot, and it runs the computers, the door locks, the contactors and the dashboard.

When that small battery dies, the car is completely dead. It will not unlock, it will not power up, and crucially it cannot close the contactors that connect the main traction pack, so a full drive battery is no help at all.

This is a genuinely common call out, particularly on cars that sit unused for a few weeks. The fix is often a jump on the twelve volt system, which brings the car back to life and lets the main pack charge it. It is not the same procedure as jump starting a petrol car and the jump points vary by model, which is why it is worth having someone do it who has done it before rather than guessing with a set of leads.

Transport mode and how it changes loading

Many EVs need to be put into a transport or tow mode before they will roll freely. Without it, the parking pawl or the electronic brakes stay engaged and the wheels will not turn.

Tesla is the well known example, where the car needs to be woken and put into transport mode through the touchscreen before it will move, and where a completely dead car requires a different approach again. Most other manufacturers have their own equivalent buried in a menu or a sequence of pedal presses.

Our drivers check for it. Where the car is too flat to power up its screens, wheel skates go under and the car is moved without the wheels turning at all.

After a collision or fire

EV batteries need respect after damage.

A lithium pack that has taken an impact can develop a fault hours or even days later, a process called thermal runaway, and it burns hot enough that fire services deal with EV fires very differently from petrol ones.

If your electric car has been in a significant collision, say so when you call. It changes where we will store the vehicle, how we position it, and whether it needs to be kept clear of other vehicles and structures for a period. This is standard practice and not a reason to worry, but it does need to be known in advance rather than discovered on arrival.

There is more on this in our guides to accident recovery and vehicle fire recovery.

Charging network reality around Glasgow

Practical advice from picking up a lot of flat EVs.

Rapid chargers cluster around retail parks, motorway services and council car parks, and the coverage along the M8 and M74 corridors is decent. It thins out quickly once you head towards Loch Lomond, Argyll or the upper Clyde valley.

Plan the winter range, not the summer one, and do not rely on a single charger being both working and free. Two thirds of the EV recoveries we attend involve a driver who arrived at a charger that was out of service with nothing left to reach the next one.

Calling us

SRL Recovery recovers electric vehicles across Glasgow and Central Scotland, twenty four hours a day, on flatbeds as standard. Call 01698 700970 and tell us the make, model and state of charge.

Quick answers

Can you jump start an electric car? The twelve volt battery can be jumped, and that is often the whole fix. The main traction battery cannot be jump started and needs charging.

Can my EV be towed a short distance? Not on its driven wheels. Short repositioning is done with skates or dollies, and any real distance is done on a flatbed.

What happens if I run completely out of charge? We transport the car to a rapid charger or to your home charger, whichever you prefer.

Do you handle EVs after an accident? Yes. Tell us it is electric and that it has been in a collision, because damaged battery packs are stored and handled differently.