In Defence of the Glovebox Toolkit

Battery issues have long been the number one cause of RAC breakdowns, and on the first Monday of 2025 they accounted for 24% of everything the patrols attended. That is one figure from one very busy day, published by the RAC on 31 December 2025, and it should be read as such. The shape of it holds all year, though. The thing most likely to end a British journey is not a catastrophic failure of anything expensive. It is a lead-acid box that has quietly stopped holding charge.

Set that against what the modern car actually carries. The toolkit has gone. The spare wheel has very largely gone. On a growing number of cars the dipstick has gone too, replaced by a menu item and a warning light. What has not changed is the failure list, which remains stubbornly mechanical and mostly cheap to deal with at the kerbside, provided you have something to deal with it.

The League Table Barely Moves

Battery first, tyres and wheels close behind: that is the ranking both large recovery operators describe. The RAC said in December 2025 that battery issues have long topped its list, with patrols attending hundreds of thousands of them a year. The AA, publishing its electric-vehicle breakdown data in July 2024, put it more precisely: the top 30% of faults it attends are tyres, wheels and the 12-volt battery, and that is true whether or not the car burns anything.

That last clause deserves attention, because the working assumption is that an electric car fails differently. The AA's own figures say otherwise. Running out of charge accounted for 1.4% of its EV call-outs in June 2024 and 2.2% across the preceding twelve months, a small and shrinking share of the workload. The traction battery is not what strands people. The 12-volt battery is, and every electric car has one, running the lights, the wipers and the dashboard that lets the thing wake up at all.

There's no exception either when it comes to the type of car you drive. Electric vehicles face the same risk as internal combustion engines.

The Spare Wheel Left Without a Vote

RAC research published on 20 November 2023 reviewed 313 new car models across 28 brands and found eight offering any form of spare wheel, half of those only on particular variants. That is roughly 3% of the range, and the consequence shows up in the call-out log: the RAC attended close to 200,000 jobs in 2022 where a driver had a puncture and nothing to put on the car, against around 165,000 four years earlier.

Getting a puncture on a journey has to be one of the most irritating breakdowns for drivers, especially if it's as a result of hitting one of the plethora of potholes that currently characterise so many of our roads.

What arrives in place of the spare is one of two things. A space saver, which the AA's guidance restricts to 50 mph and sometimes to one axle only, and which exists to reach a tyre fitter rather than a holiday cottage. Or a canister of sealant with a small compressor. Auto Express tested seven tyre repair fluids in a group test published in November 2025, drilling a 4 mm hole to simulate a puncture; the manufacturers' own claims topped out between 5 mm and 6 mm. That is the honest boundary of the technology. Sealant fixes the puncture you did not have: small, round, in the tread, with the rim intact. It does nothing for a sidewall cut, a blowout, or a wheel folded by a kerb.

The Road Surface Is Not Helping

The Asphalt Industry Alliance's ALARM survey, published on 17 March 2026 with responses from 79% of local highway authorities, puts the one-time cost of clearing the carriageway maintenance backlog in England and Wales at £18.62 billion, and the time to do it at twelve years. Local roads are now resurfaced once every 97 years on average, up from once every 93 years in the previous survey. Councils filled 1.9 million potholes in 2025–26 at a cost of £149.3 million, and one mile in every ten still needs attention inside the year.

The RAC's count, published on 16 February 2026, is the figure that matters at the roadside: 26,048 breakdowns in 2025 for damaged shock absorbers, broken suspension springs and distorted wheels, up 15% on 22,703 the year before. Compensation is a poor substitute for a spare. The same ALARM survey records £15.9 million paid out to road users in England, London and Wales, and a further £15.1 million spent on the staff who process the claims, which is very nearly a pound of administration for every pound of redress.

Measure	England and Wales, 2025–26
One-time cost to clear the carriageway backlog	£18.62bn
Estimated time to clear it	12 years
Average resurfacing frequency, all local road classes	Once every 97 years
Potholes filled during the year	1,903,498
Average cost of a reactive pothole repair	£93.79
Paid to road users in compensation claims	£15.9m
Staff cost of processing those claims	£15.1m

Source: AIA ALARM survey report 2026

What the Law Asks, and What It Doesn't

The Highway Code's breakdown rules, last updated on gov.uk in October 2025, tell you to put a warning triangle at least 45 metres behind the car on an ordinary road, never on a motorway, and to wear light-coloured or fluorescent clothing by day and reflective clothing at night. The verb throughout is should. Nothing obliges a private driver here to carry either item. Cross the Channel and the tone changes: the RAC's France guidance, updated in March 2026, lists the warning triangle as a legal requirement along with a high-visibility vest for every occupant, kept in the cabin rather than the boot. British boots therefore tend to acquire this equipment the week a ferry is booked, and mislay it again by August.

On a motorway the advice narrows sharply. Rule 277 is explicit: if you cannot reach the left-hand lane or a place of relative safety, and cannot get out and well away from moving traffic, you stay in the car with seat belts and hazard warning lights on and call 999. The glovebox toolkit is for the lay-by, the slip road and the supermarket car park. It is not for a live lane, and knowing which one you are in is the most valuable thing you can carry.

None of this is nostalgia for the boot-lid toolroll. It is an observation that the failure modes have not modernised at anything like the rate of the cars. A jump pack, a plug kit, a torch and the right spanner will not rescue a seized engine, and are not meant to. They cover the flat battery and the tread puncture, which between them account for the largest single share of everything both operators attend. The rest of the boot can go back to being empty.