Did you know that one out of every ten drivers parks "by ear"?

Parking is one of the maneuvers in which more drivers put their car's body and paint at risk. Not for nothing, it's one of the most stressful driving situations. One out of three European drivers panic when it's time to park. Precisely, according to a study carried out by Ford a few years ago, almost 32% of the drivers confessed that they needed more than one try to park. This figure reached 41% in the case of women.

A later study, this time by Nissan, confirmed this data. This way, in a survey carried out by YouGov for the automaker amongst drivers from the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, it revealed that three out of every ten drivers (33%) admitted to having damaged their car during the last five years. Of this percentage, 16% stated that it occurred during a parking maneuver.

Amongst all of the survey participants, Italian drivers were the most accident prone, since one out of every two admitted to having damaged their car during this period. Of these drivers, 26% damaged their car while parking. On the other end, British drivers were the most cautious since only 10% claimed to have suffered any parking incidents.                                                                                                                                                                                      

Are the Europeans that bad at parking?

A bad habit, which seems to be more widespread than it should be, especially in the case of parallel parking, is parking "by ear". This is parking by maneuvering the car back and forth until you hear the impact with the vehicle in front of or behind you. Well, this bad practice that can cause damage to two (or more) vehicles can be caused by poor calculation of distances at a given time, or it can be a bad practice that has turned into habit. This is the case for at least one out of every ten drivers, according to a recent study by EasyPark in Spain, but these conclusions can also be extrapolated to the rest of Europe.

According to the study, 10,8% of Spanish drivers acknowledge that they touch the cars in front of or behind them while parking. Other bad actions that can cause damage to the car are, for example, going onto the curb (something that another 10% acknowledge doing) or leaving the car too far from the sidewalk (11,5%).

In addition to this, two out of every three drivers are proud of parking on the first attempt (67,5%), but 62,3% percent confess to looking for large spaces to facilitate this action.

A majority of drivers, 85%, think that it's getting more difficult to park in their city or town. And another 46,3% don't use their car more because of the lack of parking. And lastly, more than half get nervous when there are people waiting behind them while they are parking (57.3%).

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