Moving a car that doesn’t want to be moved can be hard work, especially in a city environment where access is limited. Sometimes there isn’t space to get a conventional tow truck in front or behind the vehicle, and if the recovery agent doesn’t have the key or is dealing with a bricked EV that won’t roll, that kind of truck isn’t ideal anyway. You can also using a crane to lift one from the side but that requires even more space.
But the recovery industry – and potentially people working in parking enforcement – have a trick, or maybe that should be a track, up their sleeve. It’s a remote control machine that’s a cross between a recovery truck, a forklift and one of those things they send into dangerous areas to look for bombs.
A post on The Drive first drew our attention to these machines, but it seems they’re not new, having been around since 2012. Strictly speaking they’re not robots, because they work 100 percent at the bidding of a human operator who operates them via remote control. They’re called Eastract, are built by French firm Multitract, and you’ll find several videos of them in action on YouTube, including the one below.
Related: Paris Will Charge SUVs More For Parking To Cut ‘Auto-Besity’
It shows a Range Rover Evoque with a transmission fault being recovered by Manchester Breakdown Services, which claims the customer had already been turned down by three other companies who couldn’t move the SUV without dragging it, and that might have further damaged the transmission, possibly invalidating the warranty.
Eastract has a pair of caterpillar tracks and a tray that slides forwards like a ramp towards the furthermost wheels of the stricken vehicle, while the nearest wheels slide towards the recovery robot on a second tray. It has a payload of 2,500 kg (5,511 lbs) so is man enough for all but the lardiest of SUVs and EVs, but the sturdier TowTrack XL can cope with 3,500 kg (7,716 lbs) and wheelbases as big as 4,700 mm (185 in).
Maybe one day, and soon, these kinds of machines will be able to operate autonomously and city parking enforcers around the world will be able to double the number of cars they impound. One Instagram video appears to show an Eastract being used to remove a Volvo XC60 from a disabled parking bay in the UK, and even though we don’t know the full story it could be as a result of a parking violation, but the Volvo appears to have an approved disability badge on display on its dash-top.
For now it seems they’re mostly popular with recovery companies dealing with breakdowns, and even the extraction of totaled cars from parking garage fires, in Europe. We’ve no idea how much they cost, but we’ve all got at least one friend who’d find one of these a godsend when it comes to having a shift-a-round of the too-numerous dead project cars in their possession.