In the past 12 months alone, car parking accidents have cost UK motorists £1.4 million, specialist Accident Exchange reports, and they now account for 30.85 percent of all claims by the company.
This corresponds to an increase of almost 8 percent, and the culprit might not be drivers’ incompetence, but something much simpler: the sheer size of their cars.
Even disregarding large SUVs, even an average family saloon has outgrown the government’s recommended length for a parking space. The latter is set at 4,800 mm, which both the Ford Mondeo and Opel/Vauxhall Insignia that measure 4,871 and 4,842 mm long respectively (to name but two) exceed.
The same applies to width restrictions. The government recommends 2.4-m wide parking spaces, something that leaves precious little room for exit or entry with the latest crop of oversized models.
“Drivers are having to squeeze increasingly large cars into spaces that generally haven’t got any larger for a very long time”, the company’s director of operations Scott Hamilton-Cooper told Autocar. “Almost all of the councils we researched carried over the government’s recommendation, which makes things tight for large cars.”
On their part, automakers are rolling out park assist systems, some of which are even semi-autonomous or remotely controlled, but while this might help on certain cases, it doesn’t solve the problem of the existing infrastructure.
