A recent survey of more than 1,000 Australian car owners by insurance provider Budget Direct said it was the thought of holding up traffic while they attempted to reverse park that deterred a lot of drivers from pursuing the task. In fact, just 8 per cent of people claimed they felt extremely comfortable in this situation and three times as many would avoid it if possible.
Nearly half (48%) of women drivers surveyed said they rarely or never parallel parked with 31% of men saying the same. Similarly, twice as many women (35%) as men (16%) confessed to usually or always feeling stressed or anxious while parking.
Budget Direct's Chief Growth Officer, Jonathan Kerr, said parallel parking could be a dying art as technology begins to take over the job, while younger generations avoided the task altogether and otherwise people simply opt for smaller cars to make the job easier.
"Gen Z (25%) and Gen Y (26%) car owners surveyed are most likely to have minimal or no confidence when it comes to parking whilst 64% of the Silent Generation and just over half of Baby Boomers (52%) told us they are very or extremely confident," Mr Kerr said.
"Technology is certainly playing a bigger role with nearly half (48%) of car owners surveyed happy to have some help from technology in the form of reversing cameras or parking sensors and nearly a quarter (23%) wishing they had the technology fitted to their own cars.
"Also, more than half of car drivers surveyed (52%) said that they had either already bought or would consider buying a smaller car simply to make parking easier," he added.
Smaller cars and new technology cannot come fast enough for many with 60 per cent of respondents saying they need to parallel park at least once a week and nearly one in 10 doing so daily.
The main worries about parallel parking include dealing with traffic (61%); judging space or estimating distance (50%); aligning the vehicle and timing of turns (49%), exiting the space from a tight park or being parked in (34%); and maintaining visibility, particularly in larger vehicles (24%).
Car damage is also a deterrent to parallel parking with 15 per cent stating that their car had been damaged while parked and 6 per cent admitted to being the cause of a parking scrape.
With AAP.
