Why Dealerships Are Building Their Own Motor Clubs (2026)

The Motor Club Model Is Breaking Down

Motor clubs like AAA, Agero, and Allstate built their businesses decades ago when dealerships had no other option. You paid a flat monthly fee. You got a branded roadside assistance program. In return, the motor club sent a tow truck when a customer called. It sounded fair. But the economics have flipped.

Motor clubs today pay tow operators about $35 to $55 for a local tow. The same tow retails at $95 to $125. That spread, the difference between what the motor club pays and what the customer expects, is huge. Operators lose money on club work. They delay, cancel, or send the worst trucks. Your customers wait three hours. Your CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) tanks. And you still pay $500, $1,000, or even $2,000 per month for the contract.

Dealers are finally asking: Why hand over control of a critical customer touchpoint to a middleman? Why pay for bad service? The answer is increasingly: Don’t. Build your own motor club instead.

Think of it like this. Paying a motor club forever is like paying DoorDash restaurant fees on every order instead of hiring your own delivery drivers for the few ZIP codes you already know cold. At some point you are just renting access to your own customers.

Let’s Define the Terms (Plain English)

Before we go further, let’s make sure we are speaking the same language. I will explain every term like you are sitting across from me at a diner.

Motor club – A company that sells roadside assistance programs. You pay them a fee, and they promise to send a tow truck when one of your customers breaks down. AAA is the biggest. Agero powers many auto brand programs. Allstate has one too.

Dispatch network – The group of tow truck companies you call when a customer needs help. When you run your own network, you pick the operators, set the prices, and control every call.

Spread – The gap between what a motor club pays a tow company and what the retail price of that same tow is. For example, the club pays $45, the retail price is $110. That $65 gap is the spread. The club keeps it. You could keep it instead.

Fixed ops – Short for fixed operations. This is your service department, parts, and body shop. The part of the dealership that generates recurring revenue from repairs.

Rate card – A simple list of services and prices. For example, “Flatbed tow within 10 miles: $125. Battery jump start: $75. Tire change: $50.” You set the rate card when you run your own network.

CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) – A score that measures how happy your customers are with their service experience. It influences manufacturer bonuses, customer retention, and your reputation.

With the words out of the way, let us look at the money.

The Numbers That Should Make You Angry

Let’s look at a real dealership group I spoke with in Houston. They had 8 stores. Each store paid $1,200 a month for a motor club contract. That is $9,600 a month total. Over a year, that is $115,200. And that was just the fixed fee. They also paid per-call fees on top.

Now look at what they actually got. The motor club sent a random tow company from a pool of operators. The operator was paid $45 for a tow that the dealer’s customer would have paid $120 for. The operator showed up late, dirty, and rude. CSI scores dropped. Service lane retention fell. The service manager told me, “We were paying for a bad experience.”

When they switched to running their own network using a dispatch marketplace like TowMarX, they moved all 8 stores onto a single Business plan at $79 a month total, plus the small $3 per job fee. They now set their own rate card. They choose the tow operators. They keep the spread. And CSI scores went up.

Here is a table to see the savings side by side.

That is real money. And that is before we even talk about towing as a profit center.

What a Dealership-Run Motor Club Actually Looks Like

You might think building your own motor club means hiring a dispatch team, buying software, and managing contracts. That was true five years ago. Not anymore.

Today you can use a B2B dispatch marketplace like TowMarX. B2B just means business to business, so it is built for a company dispatching jobs, not for one stranded driver. It works like this. You sign up. You get a free Motor Club Starter Kit at towmarx.com/starter-kit. You invite 3 to 5 tow operators in your area that you have vetted and trust. You set your rate card. When a customer needs a tow, your service advisor creates a job using SMS. The job goes to your network. The first operator to accept gets the job. No app needed for the driver.

Here is what that looks like on a Tuesday night. A service advisor clocks out at 6:15. At 7:40 a customer texts the dealership roadside number after a dead battery in a Target parking lot. The system auto-texts three local operators. The first to accept rolls up in 24 minutes. The advisor never gets pulled into a phone chain at home. The customer just gets helped.

The software handles the documentation, payment, and reporting. You pay a small per-job fee of $3 on top of your subscription. Compare that to the $500 to $2,000 monthly motor club fee you are paying now.

This is the model that lets you be your own motor club. You decide who shows up. You decide how much to charge. And you decide how fast the truck arrives.

Better Operators, Better Service, Better CSI

I remember talking to a fixed ops manager at a Honda store in Tampa. Let me call him Mike. Mike told me about a Saturday when a family with a CR-V broke down on I-75. The motor club dispatched a truck from 45 minutes away. The driver arrived after 2 hours. He was rude. He dropped the car off at the wrong shop. The family left a 1-star review on Google. Mike’s CSI for that quarter dropped by 3 points. He said, “I had to explain to my GM why we lost a $500 service customer because of a tow company we didn’t even pick.”

Mike is far from the only one with a story like that. According to AAA and Consumer Reports, the roadside assistance experience is a top driver of overall service satisfaction. The National Automobile Dealers Association has long flagged the service lane as where dealers win or lose repeat business, and even NHTSA treats safe, timely roadside response as part of keeping drivers out of harm’s way. When you hand that experience to a low-bid operator, you lose control.

When you run your own network, you choose operators who care about their reputation with you. You can set standards: arrive within 30 minutes, call the customer on arrival, keep the truck clean, and communicate delays. You can drop an operator after one bad complaint. That is the power of ownership. And it shows in your CSI scores.

Documentation and Accountability

Motor clubs are infamous for poor documentation. You get an invoice that says “tow service: $45.” You have no idea what time the truck arrived, how long the customer waited, or if the job was completed. When a customer disputes a charge, you have no proof. Picture a customer who claims the driver scratched a wheel. With SMS timestamps, dispatch logs, arrival records, and photos all sitting in one thread, you can actually reconstruct what happened instead of refereeing a he-said-she-said weeks later.

With your own dispatch network, every job is logged. The time the job was created, the time the operator accepted, the time they arrived, and the time they completed. You get the operator’s name, truck number, and photo of the vehicle. All stored in one place.

This documentation matters for your service lane. If a customer says, “I waited 3 hours,” you can pull the record and show it was 45 minutes. Or if it was 3 hours, you can fire that operator.

Better documentation also protects you from liability. If a tow truck damages a customer’s car, you have a written record of the operator who did the work. You can hold them accountable. The motor club would have blamed you.

Towing as a Revenue Center: The Math Worked Out

Most dealers treat towing as a cost. A necessary evil. But when you run your own network, towing becomes a profit center. If you already track parts gross and labor gross, which is the profit you make on parts sold and on the hours you bill, this works the same way. The only difference is that you become the coordinator and keep the spread instead of handing it to a third party.

Here is the worked math for a typical dealership.

Assume you do 200 tows per month. Assume the retail price per tow is $110. Assume you pay the tow operator $55 (above the motor club rate but still cheap enough to attract good operators). The spread is $55 per tow.

Now do the numbers.

That is over $124,000 a year. You are not losing money on towing. You are making money. And you are giving your customers a better experience.

Multi-Rooftop and Dealer Group Scaling

Rooftops is just the trade word for individual store locations. If you own one store, the math works. If you own a group of 10 or 20 stores, the math is explosive. A dealer group in Florida runs 14 stores across three cities. They were paying $1,500 per store per month for motor club contracts. That is $21,000 a month. They replaced it with a single TowMarX Business plan at $79 per month plus $3 per job. Their monthly cost dropped to under $2,000.

They also standardized their network. They picked the same four tow operators for all stores. Those operators now get consistent volume. They work faster, respond better, and give the dealer group a consistent brand experience.

Scaling with a dispatch marketplace is easy. You add stores in the same account. You share the operator pool or create separate pools per location. The software handles the geography.

I have seen dealer groups use this to create their own in-house roadside assistance brand. They put the dealer group logo on the tow truck. That is free advertising. Every tow is a mobile billboard.

For a deeper dive on why tow companies are leaving motor clubs, read our article here.

Risk, Liability, and What to Say to Your Motor Club Rep

Some dealers worry about liability. What if a tow truck damages a car? What if the operator has an accident? When you use a motor club, the club takes some liability. But is that really true? Read the fine print. Most motor club contracts indemnify the club, not you. You still get sued if something goes wrong.

With your own network, you can require operators to carry specific insurance limits. You can include a hold harmless clause in your contract with them, which simply means they agree not to hold you responsible for problems they cause. You control the exposure. The Federal Trade Commission publishes consumer guidance on towing and billing practices that is worth knowing before you set your terms.

Also, the motor club rep will try to keep you. They will say things like “Our brand recognition matters” or “You need our volume to get good rates.” Here is what you can say back.

“We appreciate your service. But we found that we can deliver a better experience to our customers at a lower cost. We are moving our roadside program in house. Please cancel our contract per the terms.”

Keep it short. Do not argue. They know the model is breaking down. Trade outlets like Automotive News have covered the broader shift toward dealers running more of the service experience themselves rather than renting it from a third party. You are not the first to make this move.

For a thorough comparison of motor clubs vs. dispatch software, see our guide.

Objections, a Real Case Study, and Getting Started

Let me walk through the three biggest objections I hear.

Objection 1: “I don’t have time to manage tow operators.” Answer: You do not have to. The platform manages the dispatch. You only need to vet operators once. After that, the system allocates jobs. You can set quality thresholds.

Objection 2: “What if no operator accepts a job?” Answer: You set a network of 3 to 5 operators. If one is busy, another accepts. With multiple operators, coverage is almost always available. You can also keep a backup list.

Objection 3: “My customers like the AAA brand.” Answer: Do they? Or do they just want a tow? Brand loyalty to AAA is weak for younger buyers. What matters is speed and courtesy. Your own network can deliver that better.

Here is a real case study. A Chevy dealer in Charlotte, North Carolina, switched from a major motor club to TowMarX in early 2025. The dealer was paying $1,800 per month for a club contract that covered only 30 tows on average. He switched to TowMarX Pro plan ($39/month). He set his rate card at $115 for a tow, paid operators $60, and kept $55 per tow. His first month he did 40 tows. At $55 spread per tow, minus the $3 per job fee and the $39 plan, his net profit from towing was about $2,041. Plus he saved the $1,800 contract fee. Total benefit in month one: about $3,841. His CSI scores for roadside assistance went from 3.1 out of 5 to 4.7 out of 5. His service advisor told me, “Now when a customer calls, I actually feel good about sending help.”

Getting started is simple.

Step 1: Go to the free Motor Club Starter Kit page and sign up.

Step 2: Choose your plan. If you are a single store doing under 10 tows a month, start with Starter at $19/month. Most dealers need Pro ($39) or Business ($79).

Step 3: Pick 3 to 5 tow operators in your area. Use local recommendations or your current tow list. Vet them: check insurance, ask about response times, test them with a sample call.

Step 4: Set your rate card. Base it on what customers currently pay.

Step 5: Train your service advisors. Show them how to create a job via SMS. The learning curve is 10 minutes.

Step 6: Cancel your motor club contract. Give 30 days notice.

Step 7: Start dispatching. Watch your CSI go up and your costs go down.

For a full checklist, read how to set up roadside assistance for your dealership. Also check the pricing overview and learn how TowMarX helps independent towers compete.