Chas:
This is where the big clubs go horribly wrong IMO. They have monkee’s in their call centres.
If I phone up & attempt to explain that my lower left flange coupling bolt has sheared off & shattered the peripheral diaphragm, leaving all my oil + half my bottom end on the road behind me, they will still send a service van !
There’s a good reason for that.
You’d be amazed how many times a customer tells me a gearbox has packed up, and I find a ball joint on a gear cable popped off, roadside repair.
Customer tells me the DPF light has come on, the car’s gone into limp mode and needs to go to a dealers. I use the Texa to do a forced re-gen, roadside fix from me.
There’s a water leak from the car, it’s under warranty so needs to go to the dealers - aircon condensing. No fault found.
Transit van running rough and won’t rev. Needs to go to the garage. I fit an EGR valve - roadside fix.
Customer tells me the immobiliser has lost it’s code and needs reprogramming. I find the wire off the starter motor, another roadside fix.
Customer says they’ve got a flat and they havn’t got the locking wheel nut key. Needs recovered to QuickFit 
. Easy roadside fix.
■■ me, last week a guy said his headlights had been getting dimmer and dimmer, to the point they are next to useless. That says to me it’s an alternator fault. I carry a couple of common alternators on the van. I go in the van anyway (as we’re instructed to do). Turns out the feckwit was driving with his sidelights on, headlights were switched off. And it wasn’t the case that his headlights were getting dimmer and dimmer, rather the sun was going down and the sky was getting dimmer and dimmer. He was well chuffed when I switched his lights on.
If we recovered everything the customer says needs recovery, we wouldn’t need a service van, just more recovery trucks.
The best ones are the non-starts in the pub carpark at 11.30pm. If I stay there all night I get that motor running, just to prove I’m not a bleeding taxi service for ■■■■■■ drivers 
Usually there is a relay or fuse missing. And for some reason, the customer seems ■■■■■■ off that I’ve fixed it 
Chas:
It is not possible to fix 80% of ALL breakdowns with a service van. It might be ‘just’ about possible to fix 80% of those jobs that a service van is sent to, but to claim that 80% of ALL breakdowns can be fixed roadside is bovine excrement.
Chas I dunno where you get your facts from, but an 80% fix rate is achievable. Especially on heavies, where recovery is the last resort. This is nothing to do with fiddling statistics to make things look good, there’s a very easy formula.
How many breakdowns are passed to me? How many of those are fixed? What is the fix percentage?
See, no need to be an accountant to work this out.
Take this from someone who runs an independant breakdown recovery company.
In fact, as it happens I’ve just been going through the other shifts job sheets for the last 5 days. For the 30+ service van jobs we’ve attended over the last 5 days, 1 got recovered, and that was a shredded clutch on a Stralis.
