A wrecked Tesla below a Bel-Air home left a towing crew with little room to work. Getting it back onto the street meant lifting it between a house and a tree while traffic continued passing the recovery truck.
Pepe’s Towing Service documented the job in a video published October 17, 2026. The crew brought a heavy recovery truck nicknamed Big Flipper to the Los Angeles neighborhood, where the narrator valued the damaged property at $6.6 million.
He said a woman had been driving with children in the Tesla and that everyone climbed back up the hill without injuries. By the time the towing crew arrived, the job had already required permission from the property owner and an insurance inspection to document the damage.
The narrator also relayed an unidentified man’s account that the Tesla had swerved while using Full Self-Driving. That account does not establish what caused the crash; Tesla describes the system as driver assistance requiring active supervision, rather than autonomous driving.
A Narrow Window
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Below the property, the crew found broken masonry along the slope and the Tesla near a chain-link fence. Reaching it meant walking down steep, loose ground with the rigging. Alex, the recovery-truck operator, attached equipment to the wheels using soft shackles that kept metal chain away from the body panels.
Big Flipper is a rotator, a recovery truck with a boom that can turn to reposition a load. Its setup left enough room for other vehicles, including concrete mixers, to pass on the narrow street. The narrator said a separate crane would have required a larger footprint.
Once the cables began pulling the Tesla uphill, Alex adjusted the boom to guide it around the trees. Near the top, one tree forced the crew to pause and change the rigging. They tried an outrigger pad as a buffer, then temporarily detached a passenger-side shackle to move the line past the obstruction before reconnecting it. Watching Alex guide the Tesla farther uphill, the narrator told him: “Man, you’re surgical, Alex.”
Threading It Through
At street level, Alex rigged the Tesla so separate cables controlled its driver and passenger sides. He lifted it sideways through the gap between the house and tree, then swung it toward the waiting flatbed. The narrator climbed onto the roof to film the clearance from above.
After lowering the car onto the bed, the crew secured it while a man retrieved a friend’s belongings. The man said the Tesla would first go to the towing yard, where another flatbed would take it to Copart.