Drink drivers face swifter justice with new roadside breathalysers READ MORE HERE: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/drink-drivers-face-swifter-justice-with-new-roadside-breathalysers

The story… 7 hours roadside, No hire car & Now a Bill to pay and NO Car! Tuesday 17th November 2015 Being the amazing boyfriend i am (cough cough) i agreed to give my girlfriend a llift to work for her first week at her new company. The company is 10miles away from home in Leeds which is a 30min drive or 1 hour by bus and train. (see i am an amazing example of a man haha) We were slightly early that morning so she asked if we could go to the shop to buy her lunch instead of on her lunch break. On the way to the shop near her work i stopped to fill up with petrol at an ASDA fill up station. On returning to the car it didn’t start and the steering wheel would not unlock.. I have some knowledge of cars and tried disconnecting the battery first but the cars lights still worked and the car locked. I checked the fuses to see if any had blown (its a Renault!) and waiting for 30min to see if anything changed, which it didn’t. I felt it must have been the starter motor or solenoid that had gone. Girlfriend stressing, she walked to work and i phoned the AA at 09:00am. The AA Technician arrived almost 2 HOURS after the phone call, the technician went over the car and did the same steps i did. I asked if he can’t repair the car can he tow me to my garage that is in the same road that i live in. The Technician suggest i not use my own Garage as the AA may not cover the repair and that i should take it to an AA approved garage where i had cover to the value of up to £500 in parts for repairs which i pay a Premium for each month on top of of my AA roadside assistance, National recovery and Onward travel which includes a Hire Car for 72 hours or Hotel. I told the driver ok if that is the best way. The Technician then phoned a Tow truck and assured me one would arrive at 12:00 mid day. (3 hours after i had broken down). He then phoned a Car Hire place and told me they would phone me to arrange a car. The Technician then left me with the broken car at the Petrol station. The car company Enterprise phoned me around 11:45am and told me that they had a car near the garage the AA suggested. I told them my phone was dying at this point and that the AA said they would be towing the car at 12 mid day to the garage and asked if they could collect me from there. They said yes and we agreed on a time of 12:30 to meet. I thien got a second call back saying the branch was transferring the car to a different branch now and they would pass the details on. I then went to the ASDA to buy a charger at the cost of £12 and charged my phone up at the petrol station where the car had broken down. The phone did not die at anytime of the day. I waited alone at the same petrol station until 13:30pm until a tow truck arrived over an hour and a half later, the car was still sitting at the petrol pump as it could not be moved due to the steering that was locked. The company was not THE AA, it was an outsourced company that was supposed to have arrived earlier but had some problems. He then looked at the car too and tried the same things the AA did to start it. It took a further 20 min to load the vehicle which was in a tricky spot to rescue. I was finally on my way to a mechanic in the Tow truck drivers car. This is now 5 hours on since the breakdown.. The drive to the Garage AA near Leeds airport was approx 30min away from where the car broke down and around 45 minutes from where we live. Once we got to the Garage the car was offloaded quickly and left outside the garage in their parking lot. The parking lot was not covered. I gave the garage my personal details and Keys. They said they would look at the car the next day. I asked the Garage what i was to do as a Hire car was supposed to be there. They said they didnt know anything and said i can wait there. I phoned Enterprise and they said that the company did not have any cars and they could not get hold of me for some strange reason. I then had to wait a further 2 hours at the garage for them to get a hire car for me before being picked up and the driven to Enterprise to sign the car forms before i could leave. Taking 7 hours for this ordeal! A day after the incident i got a call from AA about the service provided and i gave them 1 out of 5 stars for their lack of services. 2 days later on Thursday around 11am i got a phone call from the Garage saying that there had been some heavy rain over the last few days and there was not good news. They said that the cars main board computer board had got wet and BEFORE they could sort out what the issue was, they would have to fix this problem. I said we are covered by AA and they must be contacted for the claim. This was not why the car stopped at the Petrol station though.. How could we have driven 30 minutes from home to the Pudsey and the Petrol station and driven every day previously if there was water damage? The car had sat outside in heavy rain at the AA recommended garage for 2 days before it was even looked at. The car was not in my care when water got inside it! AA then called at 3pm the same day and said they would not cover the claim and had me on hold for 5 minutes on their claims department. The lady suggested that the car had been broken before we arrived at the petrol station, basically telling us we are liars! How on earth can this be if we drove there! There is CCTV at the Petrol station showing we broke down once we had stopped at the pump. We had no electrical fault at this time. Even the lights and immobiliser worked when we dropped the car at the garage with the tow truck otherwise the car would not have closed or opened. We then phoned the AA and lodged a complaint and told part of the story over the phone. We got a confirmation email and a week later nothing happened. We then phoned again once we had compiled our letter to Watch dog and the Financial board of conduct. We got an instant response within an hour saying that the the claim was still our fault that there was water damage. This cannot be our fault when the car was not in our care! Our car had a started problem at the most… The Garage then phoned and said we need to pay for them to take the car apart! £55 and have the car moved otherwise we will be charged £10 for parking per day! What a bloody cheek!!!! We didn’t even want to go to the stupid AA garage and now our car is broken even more and we have a bill for taking the car apart which is now in pieces probably sitting in the rain still being more damaged and have to pay for someone to Tow it even though we pay AA a monthly fee to do this! This is disgusting service and we are really heartbroken. We have so far to travel. I work in London on weekends and need the car which we now have to take the train every Saturday. My girlfriend has had to pay for 2 buses and 2 trains every day to work, we cant get shopping or Xmas presents unless we use public transport and the reason why we have a car is because we don’t want to take public transport, we have no sense of freedom. We are paying the AA still for services we are not getting and £85 insurance a MONTH and the car is sitting in their care still with nothing being done. We are so fed up! We are taking this further and we are contacting the financial-ombudsman, Watch dog and have created our own facebook page, posting on every website there is and posting this out to our 15 000 facebook members we have for our events we run. Is there anything else that you can recommend to help people stay away from joining the AA. Sorry for the bad spelling/grammer