Who to call first, what to say in Finnish, and the two cold-weather faults that catch visitors more than anything mechanical.
Your Car Has Stopped in Lapland: the First Hour
Most breakdowns in Lapland are not dramatic. The car simply will not start on a morning that reached minus thirty, or a stone off a gravel road has starred the windscreen, or a tyre has gone down on a forest road with no phone signal for the last twenty kilometres. What follows is the order of operations, written for someone standing beside a car rather than reading in advance.
If the car is rented, the rental company is the first call, not the nearest garage
The two faults that are not really faults
If someone is hurt, or the car is in a live traffic lane on a bend, or there is a fire: 112 . Operators answer in English. Everything below assumes nobody is in danger.
Otherwise: hazards on, pull as far right as the snow bank allows, and stay in the car if it is cold. A stationary car in Lapland is shelter. Walking for help along a dark road in winter clothing rated for a warm cabin is how a nuisance becomes an emergency.
Roadside assistance is included in essentially every rental agreement in Finland, and the number is on the agreement itself, usually also on a sticker in the glovebox or on the windscreen. Two reasons this comes first: they pay for it, and arranging your own repair can void the cover.
They will dispatch a tow or road-service vehicle, and in practice it will be one of the same operators we list. The difference is who gets the bill.
Which company you rented from changes the number, not the procedure.
Most of these numbers answer in Finnish first, then switch to English without difficulty. Four sentences carry the whole call, and the last one matters most:
Olen tiellä numero … kilometripaalun … kohdalla.
I am on road number …, at kilometre post …
Give the road number and the nearest kilometre post, not GPS coordinates. Finnish main roads carry small white posts at every kilometre and the road number is on every junction sign. A dispatcher can place a kilometre post instantly; reading out six decimal places over a bad line takes longer and goes wrong more often.
One number will not work from your phone if it begins 010, 020, 030, 0600 or 0800. Those are Finnish service numbers, and most foreign SIM cards cannot reach them. Our directory marks every one.
The car will not start on a very cold morning. Nine times out of ten this is the battery, and nine times out of ten it is because nobody plugged in the block heater. Almost every parking space in Lapland has a post with a socket, and the car has a cable, usually in the boot. It heats the engine block for two hours before you drive, and in real cold it is the difference between starting and not. Plug it in every night, even when the forecast looks mild.
A star in the windscreen after a gravel road. Tape over it immediately, from the outside, with anything. In hard frost a chip spreads into a crack across the whole screen in hours, and a chip is a thirty-minute repair while a crack is a new windscreen. If the damage is smaller than a two-euro coin, it can usually be filled rather than replaced.
A working spare and a jack, checked before you set off. This is not the same advice as it would be further south: in a place where the nearest tyre shop can be two hundred kilometres away and closed until Monday, a spare is equipment rather than a precaution.
Beyond that: proper outdoor clothing in the car and not in the suitcase, a phone charger that works from the car, and enough fuel that you are never doing the last hundred kilometres on a quarter tank. Petrol stations are far apart and the unattended ones sometimes refuse foreign cards.
The verified businesses (towing, tyres, garages, batteries, windscreens) are on the
car help page , by destination, each with its published hours and the date we read them.
If you want to know how far apart they actually are, we measured that too: