Roadside & Recovery Advice

Get left, and get out on the left. Indicate, ease off the power and move onto the hard shoulder or into an emergency refuge area as early as you safely can, as far left as possible with your wheels turned away from the traffic lane. Put your hazard lights on the moment you start slowing down, not after you have stopped.

Leave the vehicle from the passenger side, behind the barrier. If there is a barrier, get behind it before you do anything else. If there is no barrier, stand well away from the vehicle and the carriageway, up the bank if there is one. Do not stand between your vehicle and the traffic, and do not attempt any repair yourself, even something you think you could fix in thirty seconds.

On a smart motorway with no hard shoulder, get to the nearest emergency refuge area if you possibly can. If you cannot reach one and are stopped in a live lane, keep your seatbelt on, put your hazards on, and call 999 immediately, not us first, because a stationary vehicle in a live lane is a police and National Highways matter before it is a recovery matter. Once you are somewhere safe, call us and we will come to wherever you have been directed.

Know where you are. The small blue and black marker posts along the verge, roughly every 100 metres, carry the road name and a distance marker. Reading that out to us when you call is faster and more accurate than a postcode, especially between junctions.

Then call. Tell us the marker post or the junction you last passed, what you are driving, and whether everyone is out of the vehicle and safe. Motorway call-outs are prioritised over most other jobs precisely because standing time next to live traffic is the dangerous part, not the wait itself.

Call this one if: you have stopped, or are stopping, anywhere on a motorway or dual carriageway, whether that is the hard shoulder, a refuge area, or a live lane.

Cold reduces the power a battery can deliver, at the exact moment your engine needs more of it to turn over, because the oil is thicker in the cold too. A battery that started every morning through the summer without you noticing anything wrong with it can simply run out of headroom the first properly cold night of the year.

Short journeys do not fully recharge a battery. Starting the engine draws a large amount of charge straight out. A ten minute school run puts some of that back, not all of it. If most of your driving is short hops, your battery can run a slow deficit for weeks without you knowing, until a cold night tips it over.

Age is the biggest single factor. Most car batteries last three to five years. If yours is older than that and you cannot remember it ever being replaced, that is the most likely explanation for a sudden flat, cold weather or not.

What actually helps: turn off everything you do not need before you start the engine, heated seats, heated screen, headlights, blower on full, since all of it pulls current the starter motor needs. If you already suspect the battery is weak, a smart trickle charger overnight is considerably cheaper than a replacement, and a replacement is considerably cheaper than repeatedly paying for a jump start.

If it will not start: a single slow click, or nothing at all, points to the battery. A rapid repeated clicking can mean the battery is holding some charge but not enough, which still means a jump. Do not keep turning the key over and over, it does not help and can flood the engine.

Call this one if: the engine turns over slowly, clicks, or does nothing when you turn the key. If we jump it and it will not hold charge, we will recover it to a garage of your choice rather than leave you to break down again a mile down the road.

1. Check every door and the boot. It sounds obvious, but a rear door or the boot is sometimes left unlocked even when the driver's door is not, particularly on vehicles without central locking on every panel.

2. Think about where the spare key actually is. At home, with a partner, in a work bag. A spare key brought to you is nearly always cheaper and faster than an entry method, so it is always worth ten seconds of thought before you call anyone out.

3. Do not force anything. Coat hangers, wedges and DIY entry tools can work on some older vehicles, but on anything with keyless entry, laminated glass or a modern locking system they are far more likely to cause damage than get you in, and that damage is then a repair bill on top of the original problem.

4. Check the key itself if you have it but it will not turn or will not unlock the car. A key fob with a flat internal battery will often still open the door with the metal blade if you know where it hides, usually a small release catch on the fob body. If the physical key will not turn in the barrel at all, stop trying, forcing it risks snapping it off inside the lock.

5. Have your details ready when you call. Make, model, approximate year, and whether the keys are visible inside the vehicle. That tells us whether this is a job we can do at the roadside or one where recovering the vehicle to where the spare key is turns out to be the cheaper and quicker option.

Call this one if: the keys are locked inside, lost, or have snapped in the barrel and will not turn.