Emergency Breakdown Recovery: What to Do in the Next Hour

On a motorway with a hard shoulder, pull as far to the left as the surface allows, hazard lights on, front wheels turned left so the vehicle cannot roll towards a live lane. Everybody leaves through the near side doors, the ones facing away from traffic. Cross the barrier, get up the bank, and stand well back and behind the vehicle rather than in front of it, so that if anything strikes your car it is not pushed into you. Wear a high visibility jacket if you have one, leave animals inside, and do not attempt any repair on the traffic side.

Smart motorways change the picture. Where there is no hard shoulder the left lane is a running lane, and stopping in it is genuinely dangerous. Aim for an emergency refuge area, the orange bay with a blue sign and an SOS telephone, or take the next exit if the vehicle will carry you. If it will not, get as far left as you physically can, hazards on, and call 999. If you cannot leave the vehicle safely because traffic is passing your door, stay belted in and let 999 have the lane closed above you before you move.

Call 999 first, ahead of any recovery firm, whenever somebody is injured, a vehicle is sitting in a live lane, or nobody can get out safely. Recovery can be arranged a minute later. Nothing on this page comes before that.

The most common thing people say when they call is that they do not know where they are, and it is never a problem. Start with the road and the direction: the M6 northbound, the A1 towards Peterborough, the M25 anticlockwise. Then the last junction you passed, which is usually the thing you remember best. Those two details alone put a driver within a couple of miles of you and are enough to get one moving.

For an exact fix, look at the verge. The blue driver location signs on motorways carry three lines: the road number, a letter for the carriageway, and a distance in kilometres. Read all three to the controller and your position is known to within half a kilometre. If no sign is in view, the marker posts at the back of the hard shoulder show the same distance and an arrow towards the nearest emergency telephone. On other roads, anything fixed and named will do: a bridge, a roundabout, a pub, or the name on the last sign you passed. Sharing your phone location over WhatsApp works too.

The call itself is deliberately short. The controller takes three things: where you are, what the vehicle is, and what has happened to it. Location decides which driver is nearest. The vehicle decides the equipment, because a car on a hard shoulder, a loaded van and a four wheel drive with a seized wheel need three different trucks. The fault decides whether this is a roadside job or a recovery.

You are then given a price, confirmed before anything is dispatched rather than discussed at the kerbside afterwards: a battery jump start from £100, fuel delivery from £95 plus the cost of the fuel, towing from £150, a mobile tyre change from £190 and accident recovery from £250. HGV work is quoted individually, because no two of those jobs are alike. If the driver finds something different from what was described on the phone, you are told what that means before further work starts.

The nearest available driver is then dispatched and you are given a realistic time. Typical response is 30 to 60 minutes, and that is a typical figure rather than a promise, because the things that move it are not within our control: traffic between the driver and you, whether you are on a busy urban stretch or a quiet rural road in the small hours, and how many jobs are already running. What you will not get is a flattering estimate on the phone followed by a much longer wait on the verge. If your location is a difficult one to reach, you are told that before you agree to anything.

The faults that come in overnight are not exotic. A car that will not turn over after a week of short journeys, a battery that gives up on the first cold night, a blowout, the wrong fuel at a quiet forecourt, keys shut in the boot, and vehicles that need moving away from a collision scene. Every one is a single phone call at four in the morning exactly as it is at four in the afternoon.

There is no night rate, no weekend rate and no bank holiday surcharge on any of it. That is worth saying plainly, because being charged more for breaking down at an inconvenient hour turns a bad evening into a worse one. The trucks are out, the phone is answered by a person who knows the network, and the price is the published one. If you are standing on the verge now, call 07960 200 253.