I frequently drive around the UK to visit clients and cannot afford to be waiting hours for a recovery vehicle. What is the average recovery time?
The major providers publish average attendance times in the region of 40 to 60 minutes, and the figures have been broadly stable for years. The averages hide a wide spread: a city-centre flat battery at 11am may be attended in 25 minutes; a rural breakdown on a Friday evening in a cold snap can mean two hours or more. Patrol operators and contractor networks quote similar averages, because in both cases the nearest available vehicle is sent.
Three things shorten the wait. Tell the operator if anyone in the car is vulnerable or if you are in a dangerous location; priority systems exist and are used. Give an exact location — what3words, a postcode or a marker-post number — so the operator is not searching for you. And have the policy number ready so the call takes two minutes rather than ten.
For a driver whose income depends on arriving, the policy feature that matters more than attendance time is onward travel: a hire car gets you to the client while someone else deals with the car. Our guide to what to do when you break down covers the call itself.
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