Andrew English's Column

	New motorists receive no real training on how to park. So maybe we should teach it as part of the driving test.

When I was at a demonstration of Honda’s auto park system recently, I asked: “Just how bad do you have to be at parking to want this device?” We were in a tiny Japanese-market-only MPV known as Life, and the engineer was showing off its Smart Parking Assist system at the firm’s own race track in Japan, the Twin Ring Motegi. This device is not desperately smart. It has been a £300 option on the Life for a year, but it doesn’t measure suitable spaces in the same way as equivalent VW or Lexus set-ups.

Nor does it steer for you, or work the throttle or brakes. In fact, all it does is measure the correct steering angle required to successfully reverse into, or parallel park in, a space or slot. Then it twirls the steering wheel by that amount. After that, through a series of confusing pings and bongs, it guides you into the gap. You do all the hard work, and any manoeuvring has to be done at the speed of a slug or the system aborts its guidance. As an option, I thought it was worth about 5p.

“Our research finds many people in Japan are this bad at parking,” grinned the engineer, showing a well developed sense of humour at a fairly pointless demo. Yet are we British that much better? It isn’t taught to novice drivers, it isn’t part of the driving test, and although we all pride ourselves on our ability to parallel park, I don’t mind admitting I get it spectacularly wrong on occasions.

The best parker I know is my aunt, who can consistently slot a big Volvo estate into a space barely inches longer than the car, at speed, while wearing stilettos. By far the worst are the French, particularly Parisiennes, who have made ‘touch’ parking into something of an art form. “Zer is a big boomper at ze front, and a big boomper at ze back,” intoned an Eighties television advert for the Citroen Visa, which drew attention to the car’s basic specification by listing standard kit as if it were extras. Paris residents need those bumpers, and their cars bear the scars of regular knocks. In fact, their trick is to leave the handbrake off when parked to minimise the consequences of low-speed impacts.

But are the French the worst? I recently watched a woman move her newish Renault into a slot next to my Ford S-Max in a car park in Guildford, Surrey. She crunched gently into the wall behind us, then stalled trying to move forward, and finally left her motor at a jaunty angle in the allotted space. Her daughter proceeded to open the passenger door with such violence that it smashed its edge into the side of my Ford, removing paint and leaving a small dent as a calling card that will cost about £100 to repair. No message was left, no apology given.

Perhaps it’s the greed of the companies which own the car lots that causes us to be so bad at putting our motors into an allotted space. Parallel parking might be a black art, but surely if the bays were wider, then at least reversing into them would be easier.

I contacted NCP to find out what the minimum width of a parking space is, and apparently it’s 2.6 metres. Westminster City Council is meaner, with a 2.4-metre guide size. But I find airport car parks and inner city supermarkets are some of the worst offenders for narrow spaces, and several friends’ vehicles have sustained dents and dings at these sites.

Perhaps we need to train our children to open doors with more care, or maybe we should teach parking as part of the driving test? Alternatively, we could adopt the American approach of huge, diagonal parking bays that you simply drive straight into. No reverse or parallel parking necessary, thank you. But you’ll probably have to run an SUV and wear a big hat.