Can You Tow Your Own Car in Florida? The Rules Deltona Drivers Miss

Yes, and a flat battery is usually what breaks that rule. Florida's taillamp statute requires covered vehicles to be "equipped with at least two taillamps mounted on the rear", each showing "a red light plainly visible from a distance of 1,000 feet to the rear", and the section reaches "any other vehicle which is being drawn at the end of a combination of vehicles". A car on the end of a strap is exactly that.

The catch is where those lamps get their power. A towed car runs its lights off its own battery, and a dead battery is the reason a good share of cars need moving in the first place. Even when the lights do work, the brake lamps come on only when the person steering the towed car presses the pedal, which is not the same moment the truck in front starts slowing. On an unlit stretch of SR-415 toward Osteen, or on Howland Boulevard between signals on a weeknight, the driver behind is reading one set of lights for two vehicles.

On most cars it turns parts of the drivetrain that are built to be lubricated by an engine that is running. Mazda's emergency towing instructions for the CX‒5 put the rule plainly: "A towed 2WD vehicle should have its drive wheels (front wheels) off the ground", and towing a four-wheel-drive vehicle "with either the front or rear wheels on the ground is dangerous". The same page tells owners "Do not tow with sling-type equipment" and recommends the work be left to a professional.

Every manufacturer words this differently and the tolerances differ by model, which is the whole point: the answer lives on the towing page of the manual in your own glovebox, not in a rule of thumb borrowed from someone else's car. All-wheel drive narrows the options further. Which truck a given drivetrain needs is covered in our flatbed versus wheel lift guide rather than repeated here, and the short version is that a flatbed carries the car instead of rolling it.

Not the way you are used to. Mazda's towing page gives the warning in a single line: "Remember that power assist for the brakes and steering will not be available when the engine is not running." The steering goes heavy enough that a mid-corner correction takes both hands and real shoulder, and the brake pedal turns hard once the reserve in the booster is gone.

That matters more on a strap than people expect, because a strap gives you no rigid connection and no control over slack. The car at the back has to brake just enough to keep the line taut without dragging the truck down, then release before the truck pulls away again. Get the timing wrong and the strap snaps tight, loading both vehicles' tow points in one jolt. Whoever is sitting in the dead car is doing the harder driving of the two, without power assist, often without a working dash.

They solve different parts of the problem, and only one of them touches the drivetrain part. A tow dolly lifts two wheels clear of the pavement, which is how the manufacturer instruction above gets met on a front-wheel-drive car. A tow bar keeps all four wheels down and links the vehicles rigidly, so it fixes the slack and the length question but not the spinning drivetrain, and on many vehicles flat towing is allowed only with specific preparation the manufacturer spells out.

Both still leave the towed car's lamps on its own battery and its brakes unassisted, and both carry weight ratings that have to match the vehicle doing the pulling. A half-ton pickup towing a loaded sedan on a bar is a different machine from the same pickup running empty, especially stopping. Rented equipment comes with its own conditions attached, and those are worth reading before the car is sitting on it rather than after.

On the roads where everything else is moving far faster than the tow is. A strap tow travels at neighborhood speed. I-4 through DeBary and Orange City does not, and neither does US-17/92 or the four-lane run of Saxon Boulevard when the schools let out. The Federal Highway Administration's field guide for highway service patrols states the underlying problem flatly: "Occupants of a motor vehicle that breaks down on a high-speed roadway face substantial risks." An improvised tow keeps two vehicles and two drivers in that position for the length of the trip rather than the length of a wait.

Deltona's layout widens the gap further. The city sits between I-4 and the St. Johns River, and the shortest route to a shop usually crosses at least one divided stretch with little usable shoulder. If the car is already stopped somewhere exposed, the order of operations in our step‒by‒step guide to a Deltona breakdown, or the I‒4 version of it, is worth more than a rope is. A truck turns a long exposure into a short one, anywhere in the area this company serves.

When the move is measured in car lengths and it happens off a public road. Rolling a dead car out of a garage, back off a boat ramp apron, or out of a parking space so a flatbed can get a winch line on it is recovery rather than towing, and a rated strap between two proper tow points is the normal way to do it. The speed is walking pace, the distance is short, and nobody is relying on the dead car's brakes to stop a two-vehicle combination.

The line to hold is the edge of the private pavement. The moment the pair pulls out onto Saxon Boulevard or any other public road, everything above applies at once: the 15-foot limit, the flag, the lamps, the manual's warnings and the unassisted brakes. Freeing a stuck vehicle and delivering it to a shop are two different jobs, and only the first one is a strap's work. A winch out gets a car back onto pavement; it is not a way to get it across town.

The useful test is not whether a strap is hanging in the garage. It is how far the car has to travel and what it crosses. A few car lengths on private pavement at walking pace is a different job from four miles of Volusia County arterial with signals and turning traffic.

Before anything gets hooked up, check three things: the towing page of the manual for that specific car, whether it is all-wheel drive, and whether the trip finishes in daylight. If any of those comes back wrong, the strap is the wrong tool, and being wrong costs a transmission or a collision instead of a tow bill.

When the honest answer is that the car has to be carried rather than dragged, Towing Deltona runs flatbed and wheel lift trucks across Volusia County, including long distance towing when the shop is out of the area.