One of the upsetting jobs breakdown recovery vehicle companies have to do is remover cars from the scene of an accident, sometime where someone of many have lost their lives. This tends not to be something the national breakdown cover organisations do not get involved with as they do not have local storage facilities for the salvaged vehicles, but they could get involved in smaller shunts.

What determines whether someone walks away from a crash like this, is all based around NCAP testing, using dummies and specific crash tests to see how your car would suffice in different types of accidents.

The AA who are the largest breakdown cover provider in the UK, were one of the founder members of the European NCAP as a motoring club proving an interested in car safety as well as the normal breakdown cover service they provide.

Of course the testing is not based around keeping that car on the road, or removing the need for a breakdown cover truck. Most tests are about allowing the outside shell to take the impact and compress, reducing the impact on the shell that the passengers would sit in.

Very often you can then see crushed vehicles on breakdown recovery trucks, that passengers have walked away from, because the cocoon they sit in has remained intact, when parts all around have fallen off or have been crushed.

We have covered a similar subject before but not with car insurance, with breakdown cover. The AA actively promotes student contents insurance so why can’t this service be extended to car insurance or breakdown cover.

The question that must be asked, why would a student have a lesser risk with contents insurance than anyone else? If this is true, or it is a case of giving discounts to student s because they are seen a future cash rich customers, why can’t this be expanded?

We ran a student breakdown cover campaign a while ago, but to be honest did not get anything like the profile we were hoping this campaign would. The argument was that as breakdown cover is less risk based than normal insurance services, the fact that the two top breakdown cover providers the AA and the RAC, offer the same price policies no matter what car you drive, the mileage you do or risk of a breakdown proves this. Any new extra breakdown cover policies attained would in fact be a bonus. Take away any commissions from affiliates of on the road salesmen and it would be possible to reduce the cost of breakdown cover to those in full time education.

For some reason advertising the AA, who specialise in breakdown cover have focused on the AA student insurance options, rather than or as well, an AA Breakdown Cover student campaign. Maybe we are biased here for obvious reasons, but there must be a good reason to get students on your side. After all they will be the money earners in the future.

Today mark a remarkable take over of many of the UK banks in order to bring calm to this financial worldwide crisis. What appears to a victim of these takeovers is the loss of top jobs in the banking sector. The RBS Boss Sir Fred Goodwin stepped down in rumour it was part of the conditions to inject billions of pounds of UK tax paying money into RBS, to save it from collapse.

RBS of course owns Green Flag Breakdown cover as well as many other insurance companies such as Direct Line and Privilege. In theory this may mean that when you ring your Green Flag breakdown Cover Emergency service, you are in fact calling a government owned organisation, or to be more exact you and me as tax payers.

We have yet to figure out if this rescue deal puts any other breakdown cover company under government control or not, until all the details of all banks and money used to buy shares becomes more available. It might be that when you pay your annual breakdown cover premium you are putting money back into the tax system, or hopefully at the very least, your purchase could increase the value of shares, so when those shares are sold, there is a profit to go back to the people of the UK.

I bet you never thought about that, the last time you bought breakdown cover. Let’s hope this brave decision gets the UK economy back on its feet and the confidence back into buying financial products ad services again.

Actually it took a green flag breakdown cover engineer over 45 minutes and a 5th gear presenter under 1 minute, so what was that about? Well it was an episode of 5th gear talking about a Renault Megane, where it is almost impossible to change a headlight bulb, to the point it recommends you use a dealer to do.

They invited a Green Flag breakdown cover man to do an experiment, where the engineer would get to change the light bulb in the Megane, but the presenter would do the same job on a VW. The results were conclusive, that it just so hard to change the light bulb on the Megane. Quotes for a dealer to do so were up to £250 and more, but in fairness did start from around £30 + vat for one hours labour, as it requires removing certain parts off the car. But who wants to pay £40 to by the time you ad VAT and the price of the light bulb, as who would pay the £250 or so, it is just a silly design.
In the end, the breakdown cover engineer need not have been embarrassed as it clearly is bad design, but you can’t help thinking if it took a trained breakdown cover engineer over 45 minutes to do this job, how long would it take a member of the public, or in fact can it be done at all.

Their argument was the design was this way to achieve its 5 star safety award, but this was quickly crushed as the VW, had the same safety rating. The Green Flag breakdown engineer was a good sport and probably knew the outcome before he started, this was a good example of keeping us infirmed, keep up the good work

After spending some time writing about Tesco breakdown cover it only seemed fair to take a look at the competition in the form of Asda breakdown cover.
The first thing you notice apart from the fact the policies are underwritten by the RAC, is that they have won the Your Money award for best online breakdown cover provider.

I found this confusing as Asda does not provide the breakdown cover service, the RAC does, so it was time to visit the Your Money website direct and read why Asda received this award. However this became even more confusion as the page with what we assume to be a list of awards just would not open on the night.

So for this blog post we cannot even link to the online breakdown cover award and at this point we still do not know what makes Asda better than the rest, even though the RAC provides the breakdown cover.

We will take you to the Your Money homepage and hopefully when you look, you will find why the medal is place on the Asda breakdown cover page

Supermarkets are into everything nowadays and 3 of the largest names in shopping have associations with the big 3 breakdown cover companies. The largest supermarket has partnered with Green Flag to offer its customers and it looks like they are promoting it more than ever.

Spread across the local Tesco car park was a Tesco breakdown cover banner, something I hadn’t seen for any food products. Looking on their website you see a further promotion, get a £15 Tesco voucher if you buy breakdown cover through them, or Green Flag to be more exact. What I couldn’t compare was if when the form is filled in the price is the same as buying Green Flag breakdown cover direct.

There does seem to a conflict here though, because I am sure I regularly see the RAC selling breakdown cover in the foyer, with the man in the uniform and the desk, you know what I mean.
It does seem strange that Tesco would put so much effort into selling breakdown cover to the extent of putting up banners everywhere.

You can’t help thinking there would be more mileage in other products, especially with the competition there currently is within the market and the financial banks. It is one thing putting out some breakdown cover leaflets on the checkouts, but to offer £15 of vouchers and spend money to sell a service on behalf of someone else, does seem a bit overkill, but heh, who am I?

Well it has been another scary day on the stock market with most of not all financial institutions taking a huge hit on share value. One of the hardest hit was the RBS or Royal bank Of Scotland that owns both Direct Line and Green Flag Breakdown Cover brands.

It was reported that at one point the Green flag breakdown cover owner lost 39% of its share value today, which of course has many people very jittery.
The breakdown cover arm of its organisation is just a drop in the ocean compared to the other banks and insurance companies the Royal Bank Of Scotland owns, in fact it was reported today, the reason why many had not pulled their finds of their bank, is because they do not know that Royal Bank Of Scotland owns that particular bank.

Of course here, we are only interested in breakdown cover and there is no doubt that over the last month or so, sales form our site has dropped, even though traffic has remained steady. A decision by the Chancellor about our economy will be made tonight for tomorrow morning, and as many look to their savings and investments, we will be looking to see how the breakdown cover owner is doing for their cash flow and will it affect jobs or even the ownership of the Green Flag breakdown cover brand.