Can a Tesla Be Towed in Thousand Oaks? Tow Mode and Flatbeds

Published 21 September 2026

At Thousand Oaks Tow Truck we take this call from driveways, parking garages and the shoulder of the 101: a Tesla that will not move, and an owner who has read somewhere that it cannot be towed at all. It can. What it must not do is roll on its own wheels behind a truck, and that one rule shapes the whole job.

Most of what follows comes from Tesla rather than Sacramento. The manual sets the method, the distance limit and the tie-down points, and is blunt about what happens when those are ignored. Where state law and federal guidance do bite, the section or source is named so you can check it.

Tesla's instructions for transporters name a flatbed truck, or comparable transport vehicle, as the recommended way to move the car. That is not a preference about paintwork. The motors are geared straight to the wheels, so a wheel that turns turns the motor with it, and a motor driven by the road makes current and heat.

The manual's warning runs in capitals, and in plain words: never transport the car with the tires in a position where they can spin. Doing so can lead to significant damage and overheating, and in rare cases extreme overheating may cause surrounding components to ignite. A wheel-lift leaves two wheels turning on the road, so a wheel-lift is out.

The rule on our end is therefore short: all four wheels come off the ground before the car travels anywhere, which nearly always means the flatbed we send for an electric vehicle. When you call about an EV, that is the first thing we establish.

Tow Mode is the part owners have heard of and the part most often misread. It sits on the touchscreen under Controls, then Service, then Towing. With the car in Park, the wheels chocked and the brake pedal held, Enter Tow Mode turns blue and the car stops holding itself still.

What it does is keep the parking brake disengaged so the car can be winched onto a deck. The manual is specific about how far that goes: the tires may rotate slowly, under 5 mph, and for less than 30 feet. That is the length of a flatbed and a little rope, not a drive down the street.

Tow Mode also needs low-voltage power to exist at all. If the 12-volt system is flat - often the very reason the car is stuck - the screen will not come up and the parking brake stays set. The manual's answer is self-loading dollies or tire skates: the wheels get lifted rather than persuaded to roll. It is why we ask whether the screen still lights. Where the car stopped matters too: on the Thousand Oaks stretch of the 101, inside weekday commute hours, there is a free state truck, and what the Freeway Service Patrol covers on the 101 is worth knowing first.

Every Tesla carries a tow eye, and on the models we see most it rides in the front trunk. There is a covered opening at the front and another at the rear. The eye goes fully in, then turns counter-clockwise until tight. That threaded eye is the point the car was designed to be pulled from, and the only one.

The reason to care is what happens when it is skipped. The manual rules out running straps over body panels or through the wheels, and says attaching them to the chassis, suspension or other parts of the body may cause damage. Cast and aluminum structure does not forgive a hook in the wrong place, and that bill lands on whoever put it there.

On the deck the car is held by an eight-point tie-down over the tires only, so the load sits on the wheels. It is the difference between a car that arrives the way it left and one that arrives with a story.

Sometimes a deck is not the answer. A subterranean garage with low clearance, or a car wedged where a deck cannot be squared up to it, forces the second method the manual allows - worth knowing its edges before agreeing to it.

Wheel lifts and dollies get used together so all four wheels are off the ground, front lifted and rear carried on dollies. Then comes the limit that surprises people: the manual says this method may be used for a maximum of 35 miles, and never above the speed rating of the dollies. California stacks a ceiling on top: under Vehicle Code 22406(a) a truck drawing another vehicle may not exceed 55 miles per hour, whatever the posted sign says.

Thirty-five miles from Thousand Oaks is a real boundary rather than a technicality, and worth picturing before the truck rolls:

• Well inside it: Newbury Park, Westlake Village, Agoura Hills, Simi Valley, Moorpark, Camarillo and Oxnard, and Malibu over Kanan Dume Road.
• Inside it with room to spare: Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Van Nuys and the west San Fernando Valley.
• At or past the edge: Santa Monica, Burbank and Santa Clarita sit near the limit; downtown Los Angeles, roughly 40 miles out, is past it.

A Tesla that has been hit hard, or sat in water deep enough to reach the pack, is a different job from one that will not wake up. The high-voltage battery is the reason, and the rules stop being Tesla's and start being federal guidance written for people who do this work.

NHTSA's interim guidance for tow and recovery operators is direct about storage: do not store a severely damaged vehicle with a lithium-ion battery inside a structure, or within 50 feet of any structure or vehicle. It also says to notify an authorized service center or manufacturer representative as soon as possible, because further steps may be needed to secure and discharge the pack. It reads that way because a damaged pack does not always fail at the moment of the crash.

That 50-foot rule quietly decides where the car may sit, which matters before the days start counting.

Whatever the damage, our side is the same short list: the car goes on a deck, it is pulled by the tow eye and tied by the tires, and where it is set down is settled first. Tell us where the car is and where it is going, and we can say before the tow truck we send across the Conejo Valley leaves whether it is a deck job or a dolly job, and whether the destination falls inside the 35 miles.