By: Mark Flanighan
Well I know many have different names for roadside assistance such as breakdown cover, breakdown recovery services or even breakdown insurance, but roadside assistance to me is when a garage or national service provider calls out to my stricken car and tries to repair it by the roadside.
By the roadside means there and then, not taking it back to the garage to look under the car to charge me more money, but someone whose whole objective is to get the car safe enough to get me and my family back on the road again.Of course I do accept there are repairs that cannot be done on the roadside and that assistance in this instance would be to arranged a recovery vehicle or tow me to the nearest garage that can help me. This happened once in Wales many years ago, when having a roadside assistance policy with eth RAC, they attended but established that the issue was with the brakes, and they will not repair brakes at the roadside, it must be done with correct tools and under more professional circumstances.
I can remember back then being annoyed and wanting to drive myself a bit further to my destination so I could look at them myself and decide if I could save a few pounds, but I was told they would not let me as the car was unsafe and they had to consider other road users. I am a bit older and wiser now and now know this was the right decision, even if it cost me some more money at the time.
Of course roadside assistance is a breakdown insurance policy and does not give you full protection should you breakdown. Full protection would include recovery of vehicle and passengers to a location of your choice anywhere in mainland UK. Some extended policies will also give you cash for train fares or even accommodation id the breakdown did not coincide with recovery of your car.
However roadside assistance policies tend to be the ones advertised on TV, at the lowest price, to encourage you to take out a policy with them. You need to be careful to be sure that roadside assistance only will cover you for the driving you do in normal life and that a more expensive but correct option is not really what you need.
Knowing who will call out to you may also be important. In my case it was the local garage working a part of the network from the national company. In the end I did not feel I got good service as it took 3 days to repair a simple brake job. The RAC did refund me the money for parts, but not all. Had a RAC patrolman attended, I don't think I would have had any bad service at all. So to choose a roadside assistance policy, consider if the breakdown insurance company will send dedicated employed professionals or a local garage. If it is a local garage, the service you get may be different in every case, so beware.
Mark is webmaster for Breakdown Insurance and Roadside Assistance
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