My wife broke down at 10pm in the car with only our 7 year old daughter, we weren't members by phoned RAC around 10:20pm and after 25 minutes on the phone finally managed to get an overpriced "pay as you go" membership costing £175 (compared to the £4.12 per month that is advertised on their website - not applicable if you have already broken down). I explained to him that it was extremely urgent as my wife was on her own with our young daughter and it was already 11pm, on top of the fact that they were stuck on the hard shoulder of the M40 in an area where the barrier is 6 foot high so they couldn't even step off the hard shoulder to get out of the way of other vehicles. Before setting up the membership we were told that recover could take "up to an hour". Longer than I would have hoped for but I thought it would be quicker to go ahead with this than trying to arrange another company. For 3 HOURS they waited there, scared out of their minds, always thinking that a lorry was going to not see them and run them over, I kept calling to ask where on earth they were, after an hour and a half it turns out they weren't even put on the priority list!! Then even once they were, they couldn't give us any estimate of when a recovery vehicle would be sent. Eventually at 2am they called and basically told us that they had nothing available (despite leaving a woman and young child in mortal danger for hours) and they would not be coming (despite us having been told it would be 1 hour and taking £175 from us)! In the end we had to call a different company who managed to turn up after about 90 minutes, finally arriving at 3:30am, getting them home at 4:30am! All that wasted time, stress, fear, money could have been saved if they had just told us from the start that they couldn't recover us. What an absolute disgrace of a company, who should really be ashamed of such awful service.