Breakdown Cover Articles
History of the AA
The AA is the largest vehicle breakdown operation the U.K. It handles more call-outs than any other breakdown company and has around 4,000 mechanics on its payroll. It boasts that it’s response time is 40 minutes and it has about 15 million members making use of its services.
Not bad for a company that was started by a small group of motorists in 1905. They met at London’s Trocadero restaurant on 29 June and created the Automobile Association mainly to help motorists cope with the ever increasing number of speed traps that the police were starting to develop as cars became faster.
A year later and the AA members were behind putting up the country’s first ever road signs and continued developing road signs until the 1930s when responsibility for such things passed to councils.
In 1912 the AA had started inspecting hotels and created the famous star classification system.
Just before the second world war the amount of cars on the roads of Britain had climbed to two million and by then, some 700,000 of them had joined the AA.
On the other side of the war in the 1950s, the AA was behind many of the campaigns to get rid of petrol rationing. And to prove its campaigning zeal, by the 1980 the effort was focussed on the wearing of seatbelts which became law in 1983.
Back to the 1960s and in 1967 to be precise, the AA launched AA Insurance to offer competitive motoring cover and which has been built up today to a massive operation in it’s own right.
In the 1970s AA Relay was launched which offered motorists the benefit of their car, together with its occupants and luggage, being towed anywhere in the U.K. Also the 70s saw the AA move from its central London headquarters to Basingstoke. It has since moved to Farnborough.
And in the spirit of previous launches of other divisions that benefit the motorist, the AA Driving School was opened in 1992. Two years later the total membership had reached 8 million.
In 2004 the AA left the Centrica Group, following its acquisition by two of Europe’s leading private equity firms, CVC and Permira, for a total of £1.75 billion.
Not a bad ride since 1905. |
