TLDR I paid $1200 for basically an off-road recovery tow with about 20 miles of dirt road and 10 miles of paved that took roughly 7 hours up and back down. Fair price?

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2011 Honda CR-V LX broke down on a dirt road on top of a mountain ridge with one way in and one way out. AAA refused to tow due to the terrain. Dispatch quoted me $450 over the phone, but the driver told me their company is a contractor under the tow company I called, and dispatch is far away and unfamiliar with the area (despite me telling them about the terrain). I met the driver at the bottom of the mountain at the nearest town since they require me to be there for them to tow it and also I needed to guide him up there. From there it took us 3-3.5 hours to get up there going 21 miles. I was towed 30 miles out to the nearest suburban city where there was cell signal so I could call AAA to tow it the rest of the way and that took another 3.5 hours. I wanted to be dropped where I was picked up, since AAA will tow on paved roads, but there was no signal there and it was 9pm so everything in town was closed and I couldn’t borrow a landline, so we kept going where I got a signal at a junction 2.3 miles away, but the driver refused to drop me there because there was nothing around and he said it was unsafe for me there (I thought it was fine though) and I reluctantly let him tow me out to where I ended up 6.7 more miles away.

I ended up paying $1200 instead of the quoted $450 which the driver said was due to the amount of time it took. He said he almost was going to give up and not do this job. Do you think this was a fair price? Another company wanted $2500 for this job. I probably should’ve asked them to give me the $450 quote in writing. But anyway a few things to consider:

I am in California so labor rates are higher in general as well as the cost of fuel. It is also a county where the cost of living is higher.

While you don’t generally pay for the miles it takes for the driver to get to you, I did ride with him up there and, as mentioned, it did take significant amount of time for us to get up there as it is so out of the way. But even if you don’t count the way up, it still took 3.5 hours to tow 30 miles.

Imo, we could’ve done it faster, especially on the way up, but I guess he was being careful. We were going 5 mph basically the whole way up and down.

The truck btw, was nothing special except for its age. What I mean is it was not a 4WD truck that most off-road recovery companies probably would have sent. It was a 1990 Ford F-series Custom Cab RWD dually flatbed and that thing was a beast. Not once did we get stuck or have to back up to re-tackle a hill on those dusty dirt roads with rocks and sand. No idea what engine it had but I don’t think it was even a diesel. It was a floor shift 4 speed manual with OD and on the way down the transmission got so hot you could feel it at your feet and I was worried it might overheat but it made it down. He was too but he didn’t tell me until we got down.

We also almost ran out of gas. We went up with at least 3/4 of a tank and came down basically at the E.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my long post.