When Chris Overend’s seven-year-old Mercedes Benz B-class broke down on a freezing night on a dual carriageway last March, he assumed the RAC would arrive quickly to help.
Mr Overend, 66, works as a professional driver and he says the breakdown group had been brilliant in recent calls.
He had paid £138 for his annual membership – up from £75 in 2021.
‘Although I was in a precarious position – right on the side of an A1 slip road – I wasn’t worried. I had every confidence that the RAC would take me home smoothly. How absolutely wrong I was,” says Mr Overend.
Breakdown: Chris Overend called the RAC before 10pm but the company had no patrols available (stock image)
Chris and his wife Liz, 64, had driven from Manchester to Grantham, south Lincolnshire, and were stranded at the RAC overnight in sub-zero temperatures.
It took more than 12 hours for the company to get them home.
The Overends first called the RAC just before 10pm – when it was -1°C – but the company had no patrols available.
“We waited freezing on the roadside for eight hours until a subcontractor from a local garage arrived at five in the morning,” says Overend, “but he couldn’t recover the car and took us to a service point.”
The couple finally arrived home at 10am when they received a call from the Highways Agency, who had provided them with foil blankets during their overnight debacle.
‘The Highways Agency told us that the RAC had not returned to collect the vehicle so they had to remove it from the roadside to their premises.’
The Overend’s nightmare did not end there. ‘I spent five hours on the phone with the RAC, being transferred from one department to another.
‘But it took another twelve days for the RAC to collect my car from the compound and take it to the garage.
‘I was not approached by the RAC at that time, nor was I offered a rental car. I had to pay for a car myself to be able to continue working.’
Lost income, replacement car costs and repair costs left the Overends paying more than £1,900 out of pocket, but the RAC only offered £150 compensation.
“It’s difficult to convey the level of betrayal, frustration and abandonment,” Overend adds.
The RAC said: ‘We have also apologized to Mr Overend for not recovering his vehicle much more quickly and have offered him a gesture of goodwill to reflect this.’
He has now left the RAC – which refunded his policy but allowed him to continue his policy for a year – and switched to another provider.
Customers can complain to the Financial Ombudsman, but it points out that its jurisdiction is limited to complaints about the brokering of a breakdown policy – arranging or managing the contract, for example over an extension or cancellation, rather than the breakdown service itself.
Social media, and even the RAC’s own online customer forum, has been flooded with criticism from disappointed members.
In the past month alone there has been a litany of complaints about X, directed at the RAC relief account.
One wrote: ‘My daughter has been waiting for over five hours for someone to come to her, alone in a freezing car.’
Another said the RAC was an ‘absolute shambles of a company’. Broken down, promised recovery within 60-90 minutes, classified as ‘high priority’ on the side of a highway. No sign of anyone for 7 hours! RAC was advised that one of the passengers has diabetes without medication.”
A third complained: ‘I had reason to use my RAC cover on my new car last night. After almost four hours of being stuck on a dark downtown street, no one showed up! Fortunately the AA came after 45 minutes. Disgusted by your horrible service! I’ll never use you again!’
And in December, TV personality Debbie McGee slammed RAC for abandoning her after her car broke down.
Not quite magical: Debbie McGee recently criticized RAC for leaving her stranded when her car broke down
Some critics blame the change in the company’s ownership structure for the decline in service levels.
The RAC enjoyed a hundred years of stability as a mutual company until 1999, but no fewer than six different companies have bought and sold the business in the intervening years.
It is currently owned by three investment giants: Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC, Luxembourg-based private equity firm CVC Capital Partners and Silver Lake, a US buyout group that owns Dell computers.
All that deal-making has increased the company’s debt burden. Although Britain’s 13 million members purchased sales of £664 million in 2022, according to the latest published data, financing costs amounted to more than £250 million.
As a result, the company recorded a loss of £316m and reduced its tax bill during the year.
RAC Group Holdings Ltd, owner of the breakdown company, paid £61 million in tax in 2021, but only £4 million in 2022.
The RAC put this down to the fact that the higher figure was ‘impacted by a one-off charge of £49 million resulting from future planned changes to tax rates.’
The company did manage to give its highest-paid director, most likely CEO Dave Hobday, a raise. His pay package of £1m in 2021 rose to £1.24m in 2022.
Stranded: The RAC abandoned Lucy Tobin’s elderly father after a breakdown on New Year’s Eve
It took RAC 25 hours to arrive
Hobday is a name I have become personally familiar with, having emailed him over the past few months about my family’s poor service from the RAC.
Our debacle started on New Year’s Eve, when my father’s two-year-old Nissan Leaf broke down at my parents’ house.
As my father is unfortunately very ill, I drove around to help and around 9am called the RAC – of which my parents had been members for two years, an ‘extra’ that came with the car purchase from Nissan.
I was told the call was classified as ‘category one, medical priority’ due to my father’s condition, but a patrol vehicle did not arrive for another eight hours.
He then restarted the Leaf by resetting the vehicle and clearing all error messages, which meant the garage could not determine why the error had occurred, so it occurred again two weeks later.
This time my mother, who is in her 70s, was driving when the car broke down.
Luckily, she was only a mile from home picking up medicine for my dad, so I headed out to take her home.
She called the RAC just after noon. Once again they promised rapid progress as it was a priority medical call.
But the RAC actually came 25 hours later to tow the vehicle.
I had waited by the car until 7pm, when after seven hours, at 7pm, a patrol arrived, but his vehicle could not tow the Nissan Leaf – despite the car being registered on the call sheet.
Standing on the icy street, I asked the officer if I should wait with the vehicle until the tow truck arrived, and was specifically told that this was not necessary.
The pickup, which I was then told would arrive at 1 a.m., would contact me at my house, a mile away, to pick up the car keys so no one had to wait in the car in sub-zero temperatures freezing until the early hours.
I went home to wait. However, when the tow truck company contacted them before the 1am pick-up time, the inspector said there was “no way” they would pick up the keys from a separate location and that I would have to wait with the car.
At 10pm I then called the RAC to ask if I would have to sit alone in the broken down, unlocked car with my children until 1am, and was told yes – unless I wanted to rebook the pick-up for five o’clock lock the next day.
I reluctantly did so instead of waiting in the car until 1am. The next day I was given five hours to wait and had to cancel my family plans.
The car was finally collected at 1pm on Saturday, 25 hours after the first call to the RAC.
The roadside assistance service’s social media account is called RAC Care.
But our experience and that of many other clients suggested that sometimes the private equity firm doesn’t care at all.
The RAC said it was ‘very unfortunate that Mr Tobin and Mr Overend did not receive our normal high standard of service.
‘The vast majority of our members receive a fast and efficient service, but with thousands of faults being dealt with in different locations every day, there will be times when things don’t go as they should.’
The RAC offered my parents compensation of £200, but their experience means they are now planning to switch providers.
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