A recent study has found that Britain’s car parking spaces are too small to cope with the big family SUVs which many local motorists buy. This is leading to many car park prangs which combined cost nearly £1.4 billion annually to repair.
This is according to the accident aftercare specialist Accident Exchange, which finds that the average parking space in Britain measures 4.8 metres long and 2.4 metres wide. Popular current SUVs like the Audi Q7, Mercedes GL-Class, Volvo XC90 and BMW X5 are all more than 4.8 metres long and they are either exactly two or nearly two metres wide.
Not only this, but the pillars and tight ramps also found in many multi-storey car parks can make quite a few parking spaces unusable if you’re driving a modern-day large SUV.
Parking prangs on the rise
The research by Accident Exchange also estimates that there has been a 35 per cent increase in parking prangs since 2014, and the continuing rise in SUV popularity is being considered a factor. New car sales figures in Britain show that in February this year there was a 44 per cent rise in the number of SUVs sold compared to the same month last year.
Not only are large SUVs more popular and sometimes bigger than parking spaces, the research also points out that popular small cars such as the Vauxhall Corsa are larger than previous generation models. The Corsa itself has been found to be 16 per cent bigger than it was 15 years ago.
With an average bill of £2,050 to repair the damage, parking-related incidents now account for over 30 per cent of all car accidents.
The Director of Operations at Accident Exchange, Scott Hamilton-Cooper, said: “Drivers are having to squeeze increasingly large cars into spaces that generally haven’t got any larger for a very long time. Almost all of the councils we researched carried over the government’s recommendation, which makes things tight for large cars.”
