Road service, like so many other services, has today become a lot more advanced than it would have been some five years ago.  Now many road service provision companies are working closely with vehicle manufacturers to install state of the art tracking devices (global positioning service technology is by far the most popular of all) into cars, vans, trucks and even in motor bikes, all with the fundamental principle of making vehicle tracking so much the easier.
You would expect therefore that a vehicle purchased a year ago would contain different features as opposed to those purchased some seven or eight years ago.  Likewise, you would expect that a road service provider would operate differently now as compared to how he would have operated some five odd years ago.  Road service programs used to rely heavily on the owner of the vehicle to call in the position of his vehicle before they were able to offer any kind of assistance, so if per say the driver did not have a cell phone on him or access to a land line anywhere close, then he was in trouble.  With all the new technologies now however, just the push of a button inside the vehicle would be able to trigger some sort of distress communication to someone who is waiting for that call.