Being prepared for a roadside emergency can be a big relief and save tons of time. About every 10 minutes someone tweets that their car broke down, and its interesting to see what may have prevented it. Its everything from a bad battery, to coolant leaking, to the major one – a flat tire (about every couple minutes on twitter).

A real avoidable situation is running out of gas. I used to have this small yellow bottle, about half-gallon size that I’d keep in the back of my truck. It was emergency fuel, and I had it mainly because my gas gauge didn’t work below half tank level. I kept track using the trip odometer so I wasn’t totally in the dark. But now I can’t for the life of me find who sells those things anymore. I guess they may have been taken off the market due to saftey reasons, not sure.

I did find another emergency gas can that would work extremely well, and its cheap insurance. In addition to that you can get a cheap gas siphon and keep that in the trunk as well. That way instead of having to walk to a gas station to fill up the disposable gas can you can flag someone down to let you siphon some gas into it. This might not be the best solution, but its one that you could have in a situation where there aren’t any gas stations nearby.

There are lots of roadside kits available that come prepackaged with some good stuff but I’ve found that some of them lack a few key items. Also, there are so many different reasons a car may break down so its hard to be prepared for any situation. The best thing to do is figure out which situations would be the most disabling and prepare for those.