The best way to describe what breakdown cover is, could be to be to call it an emergency service for your car, for you and your passengers for those times when you have a mechanical failure, in better words when your car will not go anywhere. Wikipedia descibes the services as emergency road services, although that may be related more to the USA market, as the UK use the term breakdown cover more widely.
There are some main players in offereing this service throughout the whole of the UK, although local garages will do a breakdown recovery service, should you know their number. the main players are The AA, Green Flag and the RAC, which we will write about in more detail in further posts.
Their aim is to attend an emergency road call out, establish the cause of the fault, decide if they can fix it their and then and then finaly either fix the car or tow you to a garage that can. There are more advanced policies that will transport your vehicle back home, no matter where you liv eon the UK mainland and although the names for this service alter a bit, if you call these breakdown recovery services, you will be near the mark
You are in fact buying an insurance policy, so it is regulted by the Financial Services Authority, it is not surprising that the breakdown cover providers tend to owned by insurance organisations to add value to their exsisting car insurance policy base. More information on this subject in future posts