|
| Travel & Holiday Insurance |
|
|
|
Breakdown cover breaks down
By Sarah Coles
Grinding to a halt on the hard shoulder in late summer Cornwall traffic, I had one thought saving me from despair. I had breakdown cover. Not only that; I had paid almost three times the entry-level price to ensure my car would be towed home. So, while I had an unenviable seven hours or so in a tow truck to look forward to, I would at least get home in one piece.
But roadside recovery is not what it was. Thanks to a combination of a meddling European Union, a provider in disarray, and the haphazard services of tow-truck contractors, my seven-hour journey became a 14-hour odyssey.
The EU should shoulder much of the blame. Before April this year it didn't worry too much about the humble tow-truck driver. As my first driver told me, in the past he has taken people from St Ives to Aberdeen and bunked down for a sleep when he got there. Everyone was happy, the customer got a clear run, the driver was well-paid, and the firm received payment for the full journey. However, in April, the EU decided that a tow-truck driver (unless he or she stays within 100km of home) cannot drive for more than nine hours a day. This limits them to just going four and a half hours in any one direction.
Tow truck drivers work for local companies, on contract for the big recovery firms like the RAC, AA and Green Flag. This new system requires you to be handed from one contractor to another as you cover the country and drivers reach the end of their shifts. My epic journey involved a total of five tow trucks from three different companies. Coordination and calculation So, to enable a seamless journey your recovery company needs to be able to coordinate swift handovers, calculating exactly when you will arrive at an agreed changeover, and having a tow truck ready.
The recovery firms all claim to assign your journey to either one person (in the RAC's case) or a specific centre (in Green Flag's case), where your journey will be monitored from beginning to end. The AA, however, is unwilling to disclose its system. It's hard to know, therefore, whether it has a system at all.
But in my case, the RAC didn't know whether they were coming or going. Calling ahead to ensure a driver would be waiting at my next handover point they were genuinely surprised to find I was still on the road. Not only that, but when I arrived, the RAC hadn't told them I was on the way.
The organisation has apologised for a breakdown in communications and a spokesman said: "The legislation has only been in a short while, so this is a relatively new situation for us to deal with. We are continually reviewing our service and will use what we have learned from this case to improve it."
Controlling the contractors
But there still remains the second problem; the contractors are laws unto themselves. One told me I would have to wait three days for a tow truck, before reluctantly agreeing to take me 20 miles. The breakdown firms who are willing to talk about their systems all have regional managers to keep tabs on the contractors. Green Flag, for example, says: "We have regional network managers who regularly monitor and review the service the operators provide. We measure all aspects of our performance including response times, roadside repair rate and customer satisfaction."
However, the recovery firms also pay a per mile fee to their contractors, so if there's heavy traffic on your particular route, they will be paid less per hour if they're forced to sit in traffic than if they drop you off after a few minutes and head off in a different direction.
The recovery firms are loath to introduce incentives to encourage drivers to take you further, because they are not keen to comply with EU regulations. And in my experience the result is firms who are keen to take you on a short hop if your journey is being bogged down by traffic. One firm kept me waiting at their offices for well over an hour. During that time the traffic calmed down, and suddenly, as if by magic, their per-hour rate vastly improved.
On the plus side, you may be lucky enough to be put in the hands of a national contractor, where coordination is easier. Certainly the transition between tow trucks of the same companies was much easier in my case. You may also be lucky enough to breakdown within four and a half hours of home. The RAC pointed out that the vast majority of their towings are completed by one truck, and only 4% of drivers end up passed from pillar to post as I was. However, if you're planning a trip further afield, or on a heavily congested route, you have no choice but to put yourself in the hands of an imperfect and infuriating system. I'm not sure about the fourth emergency service, but at the end of my experience I could have done with just about any of the first three.
Useful links:
|
Send Article by Email
Send Article by IM
Blog This with Y! 360
Printable View