Auto Warranty

If you were to compare the UK repair market to the American one you may find a difference in culture regarding waht to do if you car breaksdown. Yes in the States they do have “Auto Clubs” to attend vehicles in distress, but their focus is very much on Auto Warranty rather than buying car breakdown cover.

Auto warranty tends to be part of the deal when buying a used car from a dealer, where guarantees are made here in the UK, but they tend to be based on you bringing he vehicle back to the dealer to be looked at, where the warranty scheme in the USA, tends to include a roadside assistance callout.
In fact the term car breakdown cover is not even recognised by many in America, although Roadside Assistance is known, yet here ion the UK the term warranty tends to be used for new cars not used ones.

There are some makes such as Kia who do offer long warranties for certain car parts on the vehicles, but as the years go one, certain parts of the vehicle are then removed from the warranty coverage. But the point is, any breakdown cover is a seperate issue and to be emplyed by a free 12 months coverage on a different policy.

Only last month did I see the first TV advert dedicated to car warranties, so you would have to assume it is only a matter of time before we catch up in some parts with the USA.

The AA do not do this themselves but of you participate in the few cash back websites out there, you could find yourself getting a percentage off your breakdown insurance premium back. As we said the AA do nor participate directly but as they do pay commission to certain websites for delivering sales to them, they in turn pay back to you some of that commission.

The results are they probably increase their visitors many times over and what may be seen as a commission loss, now becomes a commission increase by the sheer numbers.

There is a question mark about how legal this is, as there is some legislation about cash rewards when taking out a financial contract as this is a financial contract in the form of breakdown insurance, you would need to find someone far more qualified in finance to explain why this type of programme is allowed and has not been shut down, of which we are sure would have been, if it were illegal.

So for now at least you can give this type of website a try, even without payouts you get the same prices as visiting the AA direct
Here is a typical site offering AA Breakdown Insurance with a cash back

Across the two sides of the pond there seems to be differences in what is deemed a car warranty or what is really just roadside assistance. For a start within the UK, it appears that different organisation deal with the relevant parts of any warranty and in fact are sometimes offered with say a new car by two different suppliers. In better words they get a warranty and a roadside assistance or breakdown cover option thrown in to.

They often run for different periods of time. There are cars in the UK that have a 7 year warranty, but breakdown cover is only provided for 12 months only. I the USA the warranty options and roadside assistance seem to run closer together with companies including roadside assistance as part of their warranty contract. Although there are national breakdown cover providers such as tripe A, these still tend to be different companies or at least divisions run from each state. The national breakdown cover operators in the UK truly are national, even though some still use a network of garages and recovery truck owners to deliver the service.

We hope to bring news on the warranty and breakdown cover scene from this blog in future posts and any more differences we come across in the future. See you later.