Net GDP Impact on Virginia from Full Adoption of Autonomous Tow Trucks

Executive summary 

Under a full-adoption, steady-state-by-2035 scenario, the most defensible estimate is that replacing Virginia’s conventional tow-truck fleet with fully autonomous tow trucks would produce a small but positive net increase in Virginia GDP, centered around +$42 million per year, with a base-case range of roughly +$15 million to +$70 million annually. That equals about 0.002% to 0.009% of Virginia’s latest quarterly gross state product annual rate of $813.7 billion. A wider scenario band runs from about -$10 million in a weak-outcome case to about +$120 million in a strong-outcome case. The central reason the macro effect is modest is scale: Virginia’s towing market is only about $370.3 million in annual revenue with 3,380 employees across 1,358 businesses, so even a large productivity shock inside the industry does not move an $800+ billion state economy very much. [1] 

The largest positives come from better asset utilization, lower nonlabor operating friction, faster roadway clearance, and some new higher-skill technical work. The largest negatives come from displaced driver and dispatcher income, plus increased spending on AV software, sensing, compute, and systems integration that is likely to leak to suppliers outside Virginia unless the Commonwealth captures those functions locally. Because towing is a fragmented, mostly local-service industry, the multiplier effects are likely modest, not transformative. [2] 

The labor effect is much larger than the GDP effect. In this report’s central case, roughly 2,000 to 2,500 existing towing jobs are exposed to displacement, while about 500 to 900 new jobs emerge in remote operations, AV fleet maintenance, calibration, software support, cybersecurity, and connected roadside systems. That implies a steady-state net loss of about 1,200 to 1,900 jobs tied directly to the towing value chain, even after allowing for higher wages in the new technical roles. [3] 

The estimate should be read as low-to-moderate confidence. Current evidence supports commercial autonomy in structured trucking use cases, not fully autonomous roadside hookup and recovery. Aurora has begun commercial driverless Class 8 trucking in Texas, and Gatik advertises commercial autonomous middle-mile trucking with dock-to-dock precision; by contrast, the strongest towing-specific evidence found in public primary sources was an autonomous towing-related patent rather than a commercial Level 4/5 tow-truck deployment that can autonomously hook up and recover disabled vehicles in uncontrolled roadside conditions. Virginia also still lacks an enacted broad commercial autonomous-vehicle operating framework as of mid-2026; proposals were active in the 2026 session, but did not become law. That is why 2035 should be viewed as the earliest plausible full-adoption date, not a forecast. [4] 

Current baseline in Virginia 

Virginia’s towing industry is small in macro terms but large enough to matter locally. IBISWorld’s March 2026 Virginia industry profile for automobile towing reports $370.3 million in market size, 1,358 businesses, and 3,380 employees in 2026. Nationally, IBISWorld reports a $11.8 billion U.S. towing market and 105,695 workers in 2026, which implies Virginia accounts for just over 3% of the national industry by both revenue and employment. [5] 

Virginia’s latest broad economic benchmarks reinforce how small the sector is relative to the Commonwealth. Virginia’s quarterly nominal GDP annual rate was $813.7 billion in Q4 2025, while BEA’s annual GDP for Virginia’s broader “Other Transportation and Support Activities” grouping was $4.99 billion in 2024. Even using gross revenue rather than value added, towing’s $370.3 million market size is less than 0.05% of total Virginia GDP. [6] 

The most important public-data gap is that Virginia does not appear to publish a simple, current, citable statewide table of active tow trucks or active tow-truck-driver registrations on the public pages consulted here. What is public is the regulatory requirement itself: Virginia DCJS requires tow-truck-driver registration, and Virginia DMV publishes tow-truck/wrecker registration rules and fees. Because the readily citable public sources do not expose a current statewide fleet count, this report uses employer-firm employment and industry revenue as the core baseline rather than a registration count. [7] 

A further limitation is that BLS makes state-industry occupational estimates available only through OEWS research files that are downloadable in XLSX format, but those detailed files are not rendered directly in the accessible web text returned here. BLS explicitly labels those state-industry estimates as research-use data and notes they are subject to higher model error than standard OEWS releases. That makes a bottom-up proxy approach necessary for some towing-specific wage and occupation estimates. [8] 

Baseline table 

Sources for the table: Virginia towing market size, employment, and business count from IBISWorld’s March 2026 Virginia report; U.S. towing market size and employment from IBISWorld’s 2026 U.S. report; Virginia total GDP and broader transportation-support-sector GDP from BEA via FRED. [9] 

Estimated current direct value added 

Because BEA does not publish a separate 6-digit GDP series for NAICS 488410 towing, this report estimates current direct value added from revenue, national expense structure, and compensation proxies. U.S. Census service-survey data, as reported through FRED, show national towing revenue of $12.694 billion and national towing expenses of $10.163 billion in 2022, implying an expense ratio of about 80.1% and a residual operating surplus margin of about 19.9%. Applying that expense ratio to Virginia’s $370.3 million market size yields an estimated Virginia towing operating-expense base of about $296 million and an operating-surplus proxy of about $74 million. [10] 

For labor compensation, the best Virginia-specific wage proxy found in a citable public source was a GO Virginia Region 8 industry table showing $43,011 average annual wages for NAICS 488410. BLS Table 4 for private-sector transportation and material-moving occupations shows wages account for 69.1% of compensation and benefits for 30.9%, implying total compensation is about 1.45 times wages. Applying that ratio to the regional wage proxy yields estimated compensation of about $62,000 per worker, or roughly $210 million for 3,380 workers. Because the wage figure is regional rather than statewide, this should be treated as a proxy, not a census count. [11] 

Combining the labor-compensation proxy and the operating-surplus proxy suggests current direct value added in Virginia towing is roughly $260 million to $305 million, with a midpoint near $280 million. That implies towing likely accounts for around 5% to 6% of Virginia’s broader BEA category for other transportation and support activities. This is a reasonable but still approximate benchmark; it is used here only as a baseline for the autonomy scenarios. [12] 

Technology readiness and feasibility by 2035 

The strongest public evidence for autonomous towing itself is still conceptual rather than operational. A publicly available patent application describes a Towable Autonomous Dray designed to follow a main vehicle, tow trailers, haul loads, and operate semi-autonomously. That shows the engineering concept exists, but it is not evidence of a commercially deployed, unsupervised tow truck that can safely perform roadside hookup and recovery in the full range of real-world conditions involved in towing disabled vehicles after crashes, breakdowns, or police-ordered removals. [13] 

What is operational today is adjacent, narrower autonomy. Gatik describes commercially proven autonomous trucks designed for structured middle-mile, dock-to-dock operations. Aurora began commercial driverless Class 8 highway trucking in Texas in 2025, and Reuters reported Aurora’s early operational design domain still required gradual expansion into harsher weather, more urban environments, dense traffic, and construction zones. Those are materially simpler and more repeatable driving tasks than autonomous roadside towing and recovery. The implication is straightforward: full autonomous towing is technologically less mature than current autonomous freight hauling, so any towing forecast should materially discount the larger cost-savings claims found in long-haul trucking studies. [14] 

Virginia’s regulatory position is also not yet full-adoption ready. Public 2026 legislative coverage indicates Virginia considered bills that would have required licensing for fully autonomous vehicles and automated driving systems, but those bills did not pass. At the same time, recent reporting says Waymo has started mapping parts of Northern Virginia while noting that driverless AV operation is not yet allowed in the Commonwealth. Taken together, the legal environment supports a conclusion that 2035 is the earliest plausible year for full autonomous towing, not a currently authorized operational reality. [15] 

Economic model and steady-state GDP estimate 

This report uses a bottom-up value-added framework rather than a purchased IMPLAN or RIMS II model, because a publicly citable Virginia-specific multiplier table for towing was not accessible in the sources gathered here. The model therefore estimates the net GDP effect from four channels: direct towing-sector productivity and cost restructuring, indirect supply-chain shifts, induced household-income effects, and user productivity spillovers from faster roadside response and clearance. The multiplier treatment is intentionally conservative because Virginia’s towing sector is highly fragmented and locally oriented, which typically produces smaller supply-chain multipliers than manufacturing or export industries. [16] 

The haircut applied to expected efficiency gains is substantial. Peer AV trucking studies are much more favorable than towing-specific reality. An MDPI study on autonomous trucks found modeled monthly TCO reductions of roughly 41.7% to 56.3%, and Aurora’s 2026 industry report projected $70 billion in U.S. GDP from autonomous trucking by 2035. But those studies concern line-haul or structured freight contexts, not driverless tow trucks operating in unstructured crash scenes and roadside recovery environments. Accordingly, this report assumes realized towing-specific efficiency is meaningfully lower than the freight studies imply. [17] 

Virginia’s roadway-operations data support a real, but bounded, spillover case. VDOT says Safety Service Patrol covers about 1,079 interstate miles, and the agency reported more than 232,000 motorist assists in 2025. VDOT’s 2024 statewide district summary also shows, when the district figures are summed, about 19,600 lane-impacting interstate incidents in 2024 across districts with interstate systems, with roadway-clearance times ranging from the low 20s to about 50 minutes by district. Virginia Transportation Research Council work further finds congestion costs can range from under $1 per incident-minute for minor shoulder events to more than $240 per incident-minute for severe lane-blocking incidents in Northern Virginia. That clearly supports a spillover value from quicker incident response and clearance, but it does not support a claim that the spillover is large enough to transform statewide GDP. [18] 

Central estimate 

The central estimate in this report is a +$42 million annual GDP gain in Virginia once the sector reaches a mature, full-adoption steady state. That estimate reflects a modestly positive direct productivity effect inside towing firms, a modest indirect gain from local maintenance, calibration, and systems support, a negative induced effect from persistent wage displacement, and a measurable but still limited spillover from faster clearance and reduced downtime for stranded motorists and businesses. The estimate is deliberately conservative because the public evidence base does not show commercial Level 4/5 roadside towing at scale today. [19] 

Waterfall-style decomposition 

This decomposition is an author estimate built from the cited industry-size, compensation, operations, and AV-readiness evidence. The central point is not that every line is observed directly in public data; it is that, given the cited scale of Virginia’s towing sector and the still-limited maturity of autonomous towing technology, a modest positive net GDP effect is much more defensible than either a dramatic statewide windfall or a catastrophic statewide macro loss. [20] 

Employment effects and scenario comparison 

The labor-market shock is likely to be severe inside the industry even if the statewide GDP effect is only modestly positive. With 3,380 current employees, a full Level 4/5 towing system that can dispatch, drive, and physically hook up vehicles without human presence would put most towing-driver and a meaningful share of dispatch work at risk. The likely steady-state result is a loss concentrated among drivers, smaller operators, and regions where alternative technical employment is thinner. The new jobs created by autonomy would likely be fewer but higher-paid. [3] 

Employment estimate 

The wage issue is more ambiguous than the job count. The best Virginia wage proxy found for towing was $43,011 in a regional Virginia industry table, while the new technical roles implied by autonomy would plausibly pay more. Even so, the total wage bill is still likely to fall because the new jobs are fewer. In steady state, some of the displaced workers would almost certainly find employment elsewhere in Virginia, which is why the induced GDP loss here is modeled as modest rather than catastrophic. [21] 

Scenario table 

This scenario spread is wide because the key uncertainties are wide: whether Virginia captures high-value AV support work locally, how much AV sensing/software spend leaks out of state, how quickly displaced workers move into other sectors, and whether autonomous towing actually produces materially faster highway clearance in practice. The confidence level is therefore low-to-moderate, not high. [22] 

Sensitivity 

The estimate is most sensitive to four assumptions. First, the result changes materially with the realized efficiency gain from autonomy; this matters because the freight literature is much more mature than the towing literature. Second, it changes with the share of AV systems spending retained inside Virginia rather than paid to out-of-state platform vendors. Third, it changes with the speed of labor reallocation for displaced drivers and dispatchers by the time steady state is reached. Fourth, it changes with incident-clearance spillovers, which depend on whether autonomous towing actually shortens response, hookup, loading, and clearance times on Virginia roads. [23] 

Policy implications and limitations 

The policy conclusion is not that autonomous towing is unimportant. It is that the big story is distributional, not macroeconomic. A full-autonomy towing transition would likely be highly disruptive for a small but visible blue-collar service sector, while producing only a limited positive effect on statewide GDP. That suggests policy should focus less on expecting a large GDP windfall and more on shaping who captures the gains and who absorbs the losses. [24] 

Virginia can improve the upside if it localizes the parts of the value chain that are otherwise most likely to leak out of state: remote operations centers, sensor calibration, fleet retrofits, software support, cybersecurity, roadside connectivity integration, and technical maintenance depots. If those functions remain outside Virginia, the Commonwealth will keep the job displacement while exporting much of the capital-intensity benefit. By contrast, if Virginia attracts those activities, the optimistic range becomes more plausible. This is an inference from the evidence above, especially the fact that current commercial AV value is concentrated in software-heavy, operationally controlled freight systems rather than in commoditized field labor. [14] 

Virginia should also avoid regulating toward a fiction that roadside autonomy is already mature. The current public record supports adjacent autonomy, not fully autonomous roadside recovery. A prudent state strategy would therefore be staged: controlled pilots on well-mapped interstate corridors, constrained use cases for disabled-vehicle towing, tight data-reporting requirements, and parallel worker-transition funding. That conclusion follows directly from the present mismatch between patent-level towing concepts and the much narrower real-world deployments now operating in freight. [25] 

Open questions and limitations 

This estimate has several important limitations. Publicly citable sources did not provide a current official statewide count of active tow trucks or tow-truck-driver registrations, so the baseline relies on employment and revenue rather than fleet counts. Publicly accessible, citable Virginia-specific IMPLAN or RIMS II multipliers for NAICS 488410 were also not available in the materials reviewed here, so the indirect and induced effects use a conservative bottom-up structure instead of a purchased multipliers model. Finally, there is no public evidence in the sources reviewed of commercial Level 4/5 autonomous tow trucks already performing unsupervised hookup and recovery at scale, which means the analysis is necessarily scenario-based rather than forecast-based. [26] 

Appendix with core calculations 

Baseline calculation sketch 

These calculations combine Virginia 2026 towing revenue and employment, national Census towing revenue and expense data, and BLS compensation shares. Because the wage proxy is regional rather than statewide, the resulting value-added figure should be treated as an approximate baseline, not an official BEA estimate. [27] 

Final bottom line 

The most defensible conclusion is that full autonomous towing would probably raise Virginia GDP modestly, not dramatically. A reasonable steady-state estimate is about +$42 million per year, with a practical base range of +$15 million to +$70 million, alongside a meaningful net loss of towing-sector jobs. In other words, the transition is likely to be locally disruptive, fiscally manageable, and macroeconomically small unless Virginia succeeds in becoming not just a user of the technology, but a place where the higher-value AV support work is actually done. [28] 

[1] [2] [3] [5] [9] [12] [16] [19] [20] [22] [24] [27] [28] https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/virginia/automobile-towing/41848/ 

[4] [13] [25] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190233034A1/en 

[6] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/VANQGSP 

[7] [26] https://www.dcjs.virginia.gov/licensure-and-regulatory-affairs/tow-truck-drivers 

[8] https://www.bls.gov/oes/oessrcres.htm 

[10] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REVEF48841ALLEST 

[11] [21] https://www.dhcd.virginia.gov/sites/default/files/DocX/gova/region-eight/gova-r8-gd-plan-25.pdf 

https://www.dhcd.virginia.gov/sites/default/files/DocX/gova/region-eight/gova-r8-gd-plan-25.pdf 

[14] https://gatik.ai/ 

[15] https://www.vaco.org/county-connections/virginia-moves-toward-autonomous-vehicle-framework-as-work-group-convenes/ 

[17] [23] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/13/18/10467 

[18] https://vdot.virginia.gov/about/programs/safety-service-patrol/