When your job is to help others, no day resembles another. At Nova RIA24 Services, the days are measured by solved cases and satisfied people – both for the alarm station team, and for those who intervene on the ground, with technical solutions for the immobilized clients.
Often, for an intervention driver, only the beginning of the work program corresponds to a predetermined scenario – the rest is made up of unforeseen situations, in the most diverse places, which require a vast area of knowledge and which often require quick and creative decisions.

One of our experts, a technician with many years of practice in roadside assistance, tells us about his day.

"In the morning I have this routine: even if I have scheduled rides or not, I like to get to the garage at the first hour, to check the car that I am going to use. I always take 20 minutes to go through the working papers and roadmaps and make sure that they are all up to date. I also talk to the mechanics and the garage manager, I like to know everything that is going on here and to know that nothing can take me by surprise.

The other day, shortly after I arrived at the garage, I received a request to step in for a Mercedes C-Klasse, of which the owner called the alarm station because the engine would not start. I contacted the lady for more details and she explained, without too many technical details, that the contact was no longer working. I immediately thought that the steering wheel lock may actually be the cause of the problem – the car was manufactured in 2009, and this model is an electronic one, which means that, when it fails, the car is completely locked: the front wheels remain turned in the original position, the gearbox can no longer be operated from the parking position, and the electronic hand brake remains actuated and locks the rear wheels in two distinct ways.

It doesn't seem like a very serious problem at first glance, but the solution can be quite complicated, which is why I prepared myself with the whole arsenal: starter cables and battery charging robot (you never know when they are useful), two steering wheelchairs for the front wheels, the "fake wheel" device, as we call it (in fact the correct term would be "free wheel", a double flange that is mounted to one of the rear wheels, unlocking it and allowing both wheels to move ) and a fixed trolley for one of the rear wheels.

I took off in the truck-crane and with a simple plan: if the situation allows it, I load the car with the crane, and if not, I use an alternative method, depending on how things are on site.

Once I got there, my suspicions were confirmed: the steering wheel had failed. The car was parked under a tree, between two other cars, very close to one another, so the space would have been insufficient for the crane boom. So I went to plan B: I put the trolleys on the front wheels (more complicated with the right one, because the steering wheel was turned almost to the maximum and the wheel reached the curbstone), I mounted the fake wheel on the left rear wheel and the fixed-wheel trolley on the right rear wheel.

Afterwards, I slightly pushed the car to the side, to put some distance between the car and the sidewalk, I positioned the hydraulic platform in the same direction as the car, lowered the mobile plate at a very low angle and started lifting it with the electric winch. The most difficult thing was to control the loaded car – with only one wheel in direct contact with the asphalt, it tended to slide sideways. But, with great care, I managed to get it up; I removed the trolleys, anchored the wheels in 4 points and left for the Mercedes service unit that my colleagues from the alarm station indicated to me.

It all took about an hour and a half and, after another 50 minutes, we downloaded at the service unit. Although the intervention was in Bucharest and we spent quite a lot of time in traffic, we completed all the procedures in less than three hours after receiving the order. Just in time to get back to the garage to load another car that I was going to take to Oradea in the afternoon, for repatriation.

Of course, you could say that it was much easier and faster to use the crane – this is what my colleagues at the garage asked me. But it would have been impossible to avoid a collision or an incident, given the very limited working space. And I believe that, if you are a true professional, you always find more ways to solve a problem. "

And we could not agree more! And we are glad that we work with such people, day by day, everywhere in Romania.