The car services company has been without a warranty service since last December when Motorway Direct, its previous supplier, jumped ship to head up AA Warranty.

The new service will offer a number of dealer products including a three tier parts and labour facility and insurance covering Gap loan shortfalls, tyres and MoT failures.

Daniel Burgess, the automotive director of HPI, the RAC's dealer facing sister company, said the delay in relaunching RAC Warranty was down to finding the right collaborator.

“It would have been good to have a solution straight away but we wanted to have the right partner – we were not looking for a short term gain,” he said.

Burgess said the new service will be rolled out to existing customers of The Warranty Group.

“The breadth of product coverage, together with the reassurance of the RAC name will, we believe, have tremendous appeal in the warranty market and we expect to make an impact very quickly,” he said.

The RAC said it had recently carried out dealer research to identify the key issues affecting warranty provision. It found that although 84 per cent of dealers said that warranties help to sell used cars yet 30 per cent had no designated provider.