11 July 2017
Professional Towbar Fitters | We fitted our very first towbar on the 3rd July 1997, 20 years ago last week.
Towbar Express was founded by Tom Stanforth, known to everyone as 'Towbar Tom', back in 1997. Tom has since retired, but his son and daughter still run the company.
The company was set up with the aim to provide a high-quality towbar fitting service. We have never set out to be the cheapest, our goal is, and always has been, "to be the best, not the cheapest".
Things have certainly changed a bit since we bought our first van. Back in 1997 we only covered North Yorkshire. In 1999, we employed our first towbar installer who lived in Hull, and from there we have expanded the company to the point that now our fleet covers nearly all of England and parts of Wales.
We do not franchise out our fleet because we believe that would compromise the level of service that we could offer. All of our towbar installers are directly employed, trained, and monitored by us so that we can provide the very best service that we can.
Over the years we've watched the towbar fitting industry undergo large changes as well.
Cars were a lot easier to work on years ago, we used to be able to fit up to 8 towbars a day when we were working on Ford Escorts and Austin Metros. It was simply bolt on the towbar and 'piggy-back' onto the cars wires. Try doing that with a modern Audi or BMW, and you'll end up with a dead car very quickly.
These days we are lucky if our installers can fit three towbars in a day. For example, it can take up to 5 hours to fit a towbar on something as mainstream as a VW Passat. With advanced safety systems and other technology, cars have evolved into mobile computers. It is now essential to fit vehicle specific wiring on newer cars.
The wiring for towbars has to be connected, and then 'installed' on to the cars network, a very big change from connecting wires in the back of an Austin Metro!
In 2015, we rebranded our old logo, and launched this new website, to enable our customers to get a quote and book in online.
To build a website which could generate quotes in real time without any human intervention presented a difficult technical challenge, especially when combining this technology with the registration matching facility. However, we felt that it was worth the time and investment to allow us to expand in to the 21st century.
We are constantly investing and building our business, and we are excited to see where the future takes us. We have received thousands of reviews now and you can read some of them at Trustpilot.
