Reverse Parking Made Easy

dsmalle writes "Dr. Rebecca Hoyle from Surrey University in England has derived a formula for reverse parking your car. A lot of insurance companies would welcome an initiative to automate parking using this formula I guess. I'm sure somebody must have tried to do this before, so why don't we see this in cars?" New York drivers know that a space that's the length of your car plus six inches is plenty of room. :)

Comments

Re:Good god learn how to spell

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Maybe those mathmatic types...

that's mathEmatic types.

And "curb" is the wrong spelling, or perhaps rather the wrong word. "kerb" is the original usage in England; Americans started using "curb" because the road-edging is supposed to curb the cars from going onto the pedestrian walk.

Winston Churchill pointed out that the UK and America are "two countries separated by a common language".

It's easy, with the right car

[SuperBanana]

My folks' volvo has a turning radius of slightly larger than 30 feet- and it's a full size wagon. Volvos are famous for wide steering angle. It also has exceptional visibility, due to enormous windows all around.

I can parallel-park it in about 6 seconds flat, in ONE move(no forward/backwards business), to within two inches of the curb, provided I've got 12 inches of room.

Some people just don't "get" "how" cars "go" backwards, despite how simple it really is. Of course, I had spent most of my childhood summers driving a outboard motorboat, so I had driving backwards etc down pat(boats are far trickier, since you often have to VERY quickly apply force to stop moving in a particular direction; try parallel parking a boat); trailers are still a little tricky because they have a lot of "conditions" to their movement when going backwards. In all cases, you've got to think about how the car is going to move, and more importantly, where the non-steering end of the car is going to end up based on your actions, because that's most of the game(-especially- with trailers).