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This year, RAC Roadside Assistance is celebrating 100 years of service to Western Australians. To mark that 100th anniversary, we’re looking back over where that journey has taken us so far.
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It was in the early 1900s that the motorcar first arrived in Western Australia. The noisy machines were considered both a novelty and a nuisance, frightening the horses and threatening pedestrians.
But they already had their advocates, and on 28 January 1905 a group of WA’s first motoring enthusiasts gathered at the home of Mr R. Strelitz in Peppermint Grove to form what would go on to become the RAC.
In addition to advocating for the rights of motorists, in the early years, the organisation was involved in erecting directional signposts for the small but growing number of vehicle owners and creating the state’s first road maps.
By 1922, the club’s membership had passed 1000, and by 1924 RAC had its own offices in the city, at 31 Barrack Street.
With the number of cars on WA’s often challenging roads continuing to grow, in 1926 RAC launched its Road Service. It also established a new headquarters at 228 Adelaide Terrace.
Two men who were “competent mechanics” and “of good standing” were employed as Road Scouts. HV Mason and R L Stockbridge were paid four pounds per week plus 15 per cent of the first year’s subscription of any new members they signed up in their travels.
Mason and Stockbridge were provided with uniforms and BSA Matchless motorcycles with sidecars, loaded with enough tools and equipment to make most repairs by the roadside.
With no means of communicating with each other or other motorists, the two Road Scouts would simply ride the streets of Perth looking out for breakdowns.
In addition to patrolling the state for vehicle breakdowns, early Roadside Assistance Patrols also carried out directional signposting and reported on the condition of the state’s roads, which often meant camping overnight in the bush.
A story in The Daily News from February 1930 describes Patrol Earnest Hackfath’s morning routine after camping somewhere in the state’s south-west.
The need for the Patrol service was so great that within a month it was decided that telephone lines would be installed in their homes so that members could reach them after the RAC office closed at 5pm.
The Patrol service was soon extended outside the city area, to Fremantle, Northam, Bunbury and Kalgoorlie. At this time RAC’s fleet consisted of six Matchless motorcycles with sidecars and a REO Junior Truck. Motorcycles with sidecars remained part of the fleet until the early 1950s.
In early 1933, as the service continued to expand beyond Perth, Patrol Robert Stockbridge, in his RAC van, was commissioned to travel the country areas, signing up new members and reporting on road conditions.
During the 1940s, to get details about their next jobs, the Patrols were each given a supply of pennies that they would use in public phone booths to call back to base.
In 1957, two-way radios were fitted to Patrol vehicles, and the service began operating 24 hours a day.
Throughout the decades, as cars have continuously changed and evolved, so too have the reasons they break down on the roadside.
Here are some of the most common breakdown issues WA motorists have faced and our Roadside Assistance Patrols have attended, since the 1920s.
These were the wild-frontier years, with most of the state still consisting of unsealed roads riddled with rocks, potholes and dust, rather than the smooth bitumen we take for granted today.
The Great Depression from 1929 forced many owners to forgo the regular and extensive maintenance regimes that these early cars needed, meaning breakdowns were even more common.
In the early days before outside suppliers homogenised many major components such as transmissions, there were scores of different types of transmissions available, resulting in common mechanical failures.
Contaminated petrol and diesel were also rife, as fuel handling and storage standards varied. Plus, in hot weather and without fuel injection, fuel would boil away in the carburettor, creating vapour lock issues that led to misfiring, power loss, and stalling. And faulty carburettors due to stuck needle and seat mechanisms that controlled the fuel levels in the float bowls, could lead to too much or too little fuel in the carburettors.
Old cars were prone to overheating and water loss, as this was the age before radiator fan shrouds, and thermostat-controlled electric fans were common.
Early drums-all-round braking systems struggled to cope with ever-more-powerful engines and were difficult to modulate. The handbrake was then called the emergency brake for a reason.
The harsh environment plus age, neglect, and inconsistent materials in hoses and pipes, with many using felt or cork seals, meant oil leaks were inevitable.
Tyre technology was still in its infancy before World War II, resulting in tyres that wore out quicker and were more susceptible to punctures.
The post-war economic boom of the 1950s and ‘60s brought more disposable income and cheaper, yet more technically advanced, cars. Another key change was the arrival of high-quality cars from Japan, ushering in unheard-of reliability and dependability.
However, WA’s roads were still populated by ageing cars with older tech. As such, the common call-out problems from before persisted, led by vapour lock and other carburettor issues, engine overheating, tyre punctures, and excessive oil consumption.
With a big increase in electrical components driving wipers, ventilation, extra lighting and radios, more modern models also suffered from generator (or on later cars) alternator issues.
Heading into the 1980s, a shift to more safety equipment, along with a general downsizing into smaller and more economical models, led to the adoption of ever-more-complex electronics that, for the most part, improved the efficiency, performance, safety and comfort of cars. But this added complexity led to new problems.
Furthermore, the move to lighter alloys in engines requiring better thermal management, such as sealed cooling systems and specific coolant mixtures, lead to a spike in corrosion and coolant leak-related breakdowns.
The proliferation of computer tech has ushered in complex electronics controlling new or previously mechanical vehicle functions. While this means major engine-related breakdowns are decreasing, it has also led to more common failures of sensors, relays and other plastic parts. EVs are also heavier and can have more torque and so put more stress and wear on tyres, potentially leading to more tyre-related incidents.
Additionally, with diesel becoming more commonplace in passenger cars and SUVs since 2000, misfuelling (where drivers accidentally put in petrol instead of diesel or vice versa) has become more frequent.
Advances in cars made over the last 25 years has increasingly seen mechanics and enthusiasts swap their spanners for laptops and internet connections, but these still need specialist knowledge and ability. As well the odd spanner.
Today’s most common problems attended by RAC Patrols are flat batteries, tyre issues, lock outs due to increasingly complex digital keys, and drivers running out of fuel.
Since 1926, RAC has operated 27 different Roadside Assistance vehicles. Here are nine of the more significant vehicles that transported our Patrols and their tools over the last 100 years.
The original vehicle of choice for Patrols, these bikes were part of the fleet from 1926 until the late 1940s. Initially, just two were employed to scout for breakdowns, one for each side of the Swan River. Supplied new by MS Brooking & Co of Hay Street Perth and made in London, the Matchless M3 was powered by a 990cc V-twin engine. The sidecar could fit enough spares to make running repairs or carry a passenger.
REO – or Reo as it was also known – was an American car and truck company established by Ransom E. Olds, the same man who had earlier started Oldsmobile. The Junior was a half-tonne truck that was configured as a panel van for its use by one of RAC’s most famous early highway patrolmen, Ernest Hackfath. He drove across WA, helping stranded motorists, helped produce some of the state’s earliest road maps, created driving itineraries for country trips, and erected directional signage to help motorists find their way.
The club’s motorcycles were pensioned off and replaced by British Austin A40 vans in 1950. Pairing an imported Austin cab chassis with a body made in Fremantle, they could carry far more equipment and exposed their drivers to far less fatigue than the motorcycle riders copped out in the open. They were also painted in high-visibility bright yellow, an RAC signature that continues to this day. The A40s had only a brief run at the RAC before being retired.
As the local Australian car industry increased in prominence, imported cars such as the A40 as RAC patrol vehicles, were replaced with home-grown models.
Pictured above is an FJ Holden patrol van No.39 specifically, driven by Patrol Horrie Armstrong. The FJ was the second Holden after the original 48-215 and it offered a simple and sturdy mechanical combination of a 2.2-litre engine and three-speed manual transmission. This photo was taken in 1958, by which time Holden had replaced the FJ with the boxier FE. It too became an RAC Patrol vehicle.
It was a tough start for the locally built Ford Falcon in Australia in the early 1960s, with fundamental mechanical failures blighting its reputation. But by the time the XY Ford Falcon 500 was being used as part of the RAC Kalgoorlie Road Service fleet (as pictured here), those times were gone. With its big engine and comfortable cruising capability, the Ford sedan could chew up the many miles between service calls. A panel van version of the XY was also employed by the RAC.
Possibly the best known of the RAC’s distinctive yellow vehicles, the hard-wearing Escort was on road patrol duty across two decades. This van was built in Australia by the Ford Motor Company in Homebush Sydney and adapted locally to suit the RAC’s requirements for roadside work. This includes an assortment of tool and equipment boxes in the rear compartment, radio and printer equipment in the cabin, and lights on the roof. Originally white, the exterior was painted in the RAC colour scheme of the period with accompanying graphics.
The all-new HQ was Holden’s timely reminder that it still ruled the Australian car market, despite attempts by Ford, Chrysler and even Leyland to usurp it. Handsomely styled, it proved a big seller even though it was unenthusiastically received by the Australian motoring press of the day for its lazy engine and uninspiring handling and brakes. But as a panel van, it was a rugged and capable car well suited to covering the long distances travelled by RAC Patrols.
The shift to the Toyota HiLux ute in the 1990s by RAC was a preview of Australian car-buying tastes. Compared to the Holden and Ford panel vans, the tough and reliable HiLux could offer the advantage of extra space, heavy-duty suspension, and a substantial payload for carrying gear and parts. In a move away from tradition, the RAC Patrol HiLux utes were presented in a yellow body with a white canopy.
The club rolled out its first electric Roadside Assistance van as part of a trial in Perth in 2024. A Mercedes-Benz eVito, it was equipped with a 7kW mobile charger to power electric vehicles for up to 15km. That ensured EV drivers who ran out of charge could get back on the road and to a charging point.
RAC Roadside Patrols April, Malcolm, Richard and Sean join us on the Horizons by RAC Podcast to share their stories and experiences helping WA drivers over the years, watch or listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
