Well lets be honest those who travel on two wheels also need roadside assistance too. If you are fortunate to be a member of the American Motorcycle Association you will now be able to benefit from free roadside assistance.

This is clearly not a marketing video and aimed at the membership rather than out side it, but it does give an inside to AMA membership and how being a part of a group can give benefits, beyond a magazine.

The benefits also include discounts from several retailers relating to motorcycles products, when you subscribe to AMA champion. The real benefit is that this can also be breakdown cover for family members for other vehicles including RV’s. The amazing price for the ideal is only $39 a year. Sometimes we wish we were born on the other side of the Atlantic.

The AA is full of history and although we still see this organisation as breakdown cover and insurance experts, how they formed and their purpose was very different then than now. There was a time when you joined the AA, you were seen a member of a club and was awarded a metal AA badges that you would display proudly on the front of you car, in the days when you had chrome gills to take a metal badge.

The motoring badges have now become collector items, sometime going for tidy sums at collector’s fairs and auctions. The AA badges were used from 1906 right up to 1967, when the traditional square logo that is used today standardised the logo. As usual progress and the need to reduce costs meant that the badge was an unnecessary product, that in later years were just not used even when they were allocated.

Today, even if we wanted to there are very few cars which have the ability to show a metal badge even if we wanted to. So the Automobile Associations collector items are just that, for collectors only and a bit of nostalgia.

The AA website has an article explaining the various badges that were produced over the decades. Now most of us are not bothered about membership of a motoring club. All we want is someone to give us breakdown cover in our time of need and it is down to cost and quality of service that gets our custom, not the design of our badges.