Are you in good hands with Allstate? No. Not if you want roadside assistance, like a jump start, and make an appointment, and expect Allstate to get a tow truck or roadside assistance truck to arrive on time, or a half hour late, or 45 minutes late

 My friend has a Prius ( I'll let you add your own jokes, she's heard all of mine) and just got back from spending 6 weeks with her mom, 3 with her dad who was dying of cancer. Yup, she hung around for weeks afterward to be with her mom, who for the first time on her 80 some years of life, is now living alone, after her high school sweet heart just died. 

So, yeah, my friend is cool like that to spend weeks with her mom, and still work via laptop, and help with funeral arrangements etc. 

Anyway, the 10 year old 12 v car battery in the Prius finally had enough, and when she got back here to San Diego, it wasn't able to get the car started, and the morons who designed the Prius has this big damn battery pack that can't be accessed to start the combustion engine. 

And now that we're caught up with the reason it's now in need of a 12v battery, as she thought it was likely that being dead the one time she returned after weeks, was simply due to long term non use, but today she sat in the car for a half hour doing stuff that resulted in the battery draining some more, and it wouldn't start the car again. 

So, she needed another jump, and called Allstate, and they have some damn app that informs their customers that they've made an appointment, and when to expect the tow truck to arrive. Well, the tow truck people, in this case, Andy's Towing doesn't update anyone on the current situation the tow truck driver is in, nor when he expects to be onto the next assignment, in this case - jump starting my friend. 

So, I go to hang out and keep her company, as I don't have jumper cables, because the last time I helped out someone who needed a jump I ended up having to buy an alternator. 

Allstate, it turns out, doesn't have someone answer the phone at 877 810 0834 when you want to talk to "Roadside Assistance". But the message you have to listen will tell you all about Covid first, before you can request " "Roadside Assistance" then it tells you, hey, go ahead and text us first. 

So, no human is going to answer the phone, and the app isn't helpful in anyway when you want to know why they are late, BUT it does have an icon feature that lets you call and talk to their dispatcher.

BUT you will want to know why the hell they have a dispatcher, when there is only ONE driver in the 7th largest city in the USA, to answer service requests. AND I just called them at 619 900 8095, and this "24 hour" roadside assistance company? 

DOESN'T answer the phone, DOESN'T have an answering service, and DOESN'T forward the call to the ONE driver they have after 6 pm.

Yeah, straight to a message that says "Our mail box is full, GOOD BYE" 

Instead, the night turned out a bit different then expected when some stranger offered to give her a jump when he overheard the conversation we were having when my friends patience ran out, and I offered to take out her car battery and take it to my garage and put it on my battery charger. Yes, it has occurred to me that this entire wasted night could have been avoided if we had went with my leaving work and getting right to her car, pull he battery, and put it on the charger, give it a couple hours, and then put it back in her Prius, and she'd be set. 

Or take her to Autozone where she could buy a battery and then I could either swap it out or show her how to swap out her own battery. 

Instead we caught up on chit chat, learned that Allstate let her down, that BOTH of us are switching to AAA, and that Allstate went with the one tow truck company that CAN NOT be trusted to get a driver to help a woman that made a damn appointment. 

But you're never going to learn a damn thing about all this stuff on Auto blog, Jalopnik, Petrolicious, Bangshift, Hooniverse, Carscoops, Silodrome etc. 

But some "top 54 blogs" list felt all those websites were blogs, and decided they all do a better job blogging than I do. Very few blogs are even in that list, of what seems to be every car website in the English language

But do you want to know when a car insurance company lets your friends down, or a tow truck company advertises as 24 hours, but isn't even answering the phone or able to send someone to help when you have an appointment? Or do you want more boring articles about new Porches and Jaguars? As that's all Car and Driver seems to have, and they were #38 on that list.