Auto Hauling Straps

Meaning of Auto-Hauling Straps

Auto-hauling straps are short ratchet straps made of heavy-duty polyester webbing, designed to secure vehicular cargo and keep the car you’re hauling from moving too much.

Auto-hauling straps come with a wide variety of end fittings. To secure the car you want to haul, learn which end-fittings are compatible with the floor anchor points or side anchor points on your truck.

Different auto-hauling straps use different methods to secure vehicular cargo, but all straps work by binding the wheels or axles on the vehicles.

Types of Auto-Hauling Straps

Auto-hauling straps can be divided into four categories:

• Axle Straps,
• Wheel Nets (sometimes called wheel straps),
• Over-the-Wheel Straps,
• Tow Dolly Straps.

1. Axle straps :

Axle straps loop around the axle of a vehicle in order to secure it. These are sometimes called lasso axle straps. These straps only touch the axle of the car you’re hauling, never the wheels.

To use an axle strap, first make sure the anchor points on your truck are on the floor of the truck bed itself, rather than on the sides of the truck; axle straps are only compatible with floor anchor points. 

Most axle straps’ end fittings are snap hooks. While there are other end-fitting options out there for axle straps, snap hooks are by far the most common.

An axle strap loops around the axle of the car you’re hauling. 

2. Wheel straps :

Wheel straps are sometimes called lasso wheel straps, because the strap is shaped like a single circle that can be tightened horizontally around a car’s wheel. This circle then connects to the part of the strap that you latch to the truck bed.

Some wheel straps have one anchor point per wheel, while others have two anchor points per wheel. The more anchor points the strap uses, the more firmly the car is held in place. Using an eight-point tie-down kit (which secures every wheel with two anchor-points per wheel) gives you maximum load security. An eight-point kit virtually eliminates the risk of scratching or damaging the car during transport.

This auto-hauler used Mytee’s Eight-point tie-down kit to move his luxury Porsche. It arrived scratch-free in perfect condition.

Lasso wheel straps are mainly used when a car is transported on a flatbed trailer, flatbed tow truck, or inside a semi-truck.

Wheel straps come with a wide variety of end-fitting options. They can be secured to anchor points on the side of a flatbed, the side of a semi-truck trailer, or the floor of either kind of trailer.

3. Over-the-wheel straps :

Over-the-wheel straps only touch the tire of a car, not the car’s axle or the center hubcap of the wheel. While lasso wheel straps may have either one or two anchor points, over-the-wheel straps always use two anchor points.

This tire is secured with an over-the-wheel strap.

Over-the-wheel straps are only compatible with truck beds that have floor anchor points (e-tracks, for example). For this reason, over-the-wheel straps are pretty much only used by specialty car carriers and trucks made for auto-hauling.

4. Tow dolly straps :

Tow dolly straps are sometimes called tow dolly baskets, tow dolly nets, or simply wheel nets. Tow dolly straps look like nets: they have multiple, criss-crossing arms of the polyester webbing fabric that combine to create a basket-like pattern.

Tow dolly straps create a “net” over the tire.

Tow dolly straps are used exclusively with tow dolly trailers. The basket-style design helps secure the car more firmly on the platform of a dolly trailer, which is important because only the two front wheels of a car can be secured to a dolly trailer: the back wheels of the transported car roll along as the dolly trailer tows it.

Auto-YouTuber NoNonsenseKnowHow demonstrates how to secure a car for transport on a tow dolly using tow dolly straps.