Many years ago I visited Buenos Aires, Argentina. In the flat parts of the city center, people would parallel-park their cars and leave them in neutral (very few cars had automatic transmissions) and without setting the parking brake. When you arrived and found a parking spot, there would be a man that, for some standard tip, would push all the cars in front or behind you, one at a time, until they were all bumper to bumper. This expanded the slot where you wanted to park, making your parking very easy.
When you wanted to leave, he would likewise push cars in front or behind you to widen the slot where you were, making it easy for you to pull out.
I have found that across most of the world (including expensive "first world" countries in Europe) it is perfectly normal for cars to have random dings and bumps from everyday use. I had a tour guide in Italy who "nudged" the cars on either end while getting into a parking spot and no one thought twice about it. In the US it would have caused a mini riot.
Over here for some reason it is socially unacceptable to have a car in less than pristine factory condition even after months or years of use, and people will spend thousands to fix the tiniest of scratches. It's crazy just how much of the average person's paycheck goes towards just getting from one place to another.
In the UK this would be deeply frowned upon. Front + Rear dashcams would be used to claim on insurance and report a "hit and run" accident to the police.
I don't put it down to people trying to "make space", more down to incompetence IMO.
At least in the UK cars will generally be parked with the handbrake ("emergency brake" in the US AIUI) engaged, meaning that the back wheels will not move, so "nudging" a car will only damage it - if you are "nudging" hard enough to make the stationary wheels slide along tarmac, then that is quite some considerable force. A "little bump" can be enough to cause some expensive damage on modern cars.
So if you are "nudging" another car, I'd put it down to just being a bit of a crap driver who doesn't know what they're doing as you're basically simply driving into things (deliberately or accidentally)
> A "little bump" can be enough to cause some expensive damage on modern cars.
But the point is it's only expensive because people insist on repairing minor cosmetic damage to factory condition.
If people just accepted that when they leave giant objects lying around in public then they're going to get scratched occasionally, it would be cheaper and easier for everyone.
I think it depends on population density as well. I grew up in a rural area in the US and now live in Philadelphia on a tiny side street barely two cars wide. Every single car on our street has scratches/small dents on the bumper and fender from others parallel parking. If you live here you have to accept that "bumpers are for bumping"!
I mean broken lights, broken parking sensors, broken washer jets, damaged number plates etc. Modern bumpers are designed to prevent injuries to pedestrians - it may "look fine" from the outside but internal mounting brackets etc may be bent out of alignment or otherwise damaged. These are all expensive to put right.
It's not normal in the UK to ever touch another car with your own. However I have heard that it happens in some towns/cities on the continent. I'm guessing they park on flat roads and leave the handbrake off. No idea how a car is supposed to escape if it's wedged between two others though.
As for dashcams, don't these normally switch off while the car is parked?
Where most of HN lives, yeah people go crazy over that crap.
Detroit PD would do their best not to laugh at you if you tried to get them to file a police report for a hit and run if "parking bump" was the nature of the hit. And insurance would probably try and stonewall you either way.
Is that true everywhere in the US? In NYC I saw a lot of cars with rubber bumper guards, presumably to protect against these little "nudges" when parking.
That sounds like the French system, only they push the other car forward with their car instead of requiring some random car pusher guy. And somehow that is legal (?)
Just over the border in Germany there's a good chance of getting beaten to death if you attempt something like that. Cars are holy here.
I'm not sure where this myth comes from but in France, although it's not a crime to slightly bump the car in front or before by mistake while parking if there isn't much space, it would be very much frowned upon to do it with enough force to actually move the other cars.
Using the handbrake while the car is parked is universal, and in most modern cars the handbrake activates automatically, so it would likely cause actual damage to try and move the other cars with your own. It's also not uncommon for people to put their car in 1st gear on purpose when parked (in my experience, mostly older people who don't fully trust handbrakes) so you'd be unlikely to move those at all.
It wouldn't be legal in any case, although I suppose it would be difficult to be covered by insurance without video evidence. If it happens when you aren't there then tough luck, but if you saw someone touch your car while parking you would go to them, check for damage and if there is indeed any damage you would both fill a constat d'accident (standardised European Accident Statement) to let your insurances sort it out.
Hm, personally, I got warned about this by my French language teacher. And the fact that there are videos of this "bumper-parking" happening [1][2][3] made it believable. Just over the border, touching a car like that is not a crime - but an accident (and leaving from an accident site without contacting the owner of the other vehicle OR the police is a crime).
All cars bumping others in your videos are already pretty damaged though and they are all in Paris, which is pretty much agreed upon in France to be home of the worst drivers in the country. I'm not surprised their drivers are doing this, but that doesn't make it a normal thing to do. Also, the "c'est normal en France" comments and applause in the second video are obviously sarcastic.
These are 100% just bad drivers that are lucky the owners of the other cars weren't here (and would have probably fled in that case). As I said, this behaviour results in filling an accident statement if the victim is present (and if actual damage is observed of course).
> It's also not uncommon for people to put their car in 1st gear on purpose when parked (in my experience, mostly older people who don't fully trust handbrakes)
Having been a Saab owner, a habit I can't break is leaving my car in reverse (my Volvo's reverse gear position is the same as Saab's) with the handbrake on (a fairly universal thing in the UK).
This is one of my favorite things about living in Germany. I bought my current car in 2018; it doesn't have a single scratch. Back home I'd be lucky to go six months without some careless idiot damaging it.
It's in fact one of my least favorite things about living in Germany (not the pristine-ness, but the holiness GP mentioned). Cars are absolutely holy, many drivers absolutely freak out when you dare touching their car or take up precious road space with your unworthy bicycle. Traffic rules for cars are often mere recommendations, and breaking them goes unsanctioned. Prioritizing motorized traffic is a borderline religion (e.g. the eternal discussion about a speed limit on the Autobahn), and other means of traffic are only very slowly awakening. What a waste of space, resources and quality of life.
People also don't hesitate to honk if you are driving with a bike, or even a car slowly. It has a fine of 10 Euros, so nobody cares (even the Police themselves) if you call the police for abusive honking.
Last week we were driving 43km/s on a road with 50km/s limit. The driver behind us drove 10cm away from our bumper for like 5 minutes, and even though our indicator was on he didn't calculate we will slow down even further to turn right, and made an emergency brake then honked like 10 seconds as he/she was driving away as fast as that car could.
To be fair, it's not remotely as bad as back in Istanbul (what a mess there!), but I expected more from Germany, a country in which people normally love sticking to the rules.
In a weird way, it calms me down to see others also having similar problems. Edit: Just opened the latest video and here's another one - https://youtu.be/8mUi2uOzXvs?t=543
> People also don't hesitate to honk if you are driving with a bike, or even a car slowly.
The acoustic warning signal is meant to warn other traffic participants of imminent danger - which includes the intend to overtake (outside of towns). There is no fine for that.
> but I expected more from Germany, a country in which people normally love sticking to the rules.
Careful there: Your scenario does not exactly paint you as a hero. Driving deliberately slowly (you mentioned for "like 5 minutes") when higher speeds are possible (both from the street conditions and your vehicle's capabilities), if it hinders others from using legal use of the road (which includes driving at the speed limit), can be construed to be "Nötigung", which is a crime. (The other driver of course could be fined for the same as well)
> The acoustic warning signal is meant to warn other traffic participants of imminent danger - which includes the intend to overtake (outside of towns). There is no fine for that.
Honking before overtaking is completely fine, I know my rules. Imminent danger honking is allowed everywhere, even in towns. It's completely not allowed honking to mean "drive faster".
> Careful there: Your scenario does not exactly paint you as a hero
You are missing context, perhaps I should have given the full picture: The road IMHO wasn't suitable to drive at 50km/h. It was curvy with many parked cars on the sides. I wasn't trying to annoy anyone. I even started breaking earlier before turn so it wasn't a harder break, which may have saved us from an accident. Also 43 is nowhere near going "too slow". You need to drive 25 or less, so that it becomes a dangerous situation. The instructors would give you a warning in an exam before failing you if you do it twice, if you drive less than half the limit.
You can also drive 60km/h in a country road (limit 100km/h), and as long as you do not go below 50 for an extended period of time, you don't need to worry. If you are going slowly just to piss someone off, or you are creating a dangerous situation (for example, blocking the flow of the traffic when there's cross-traffic), that's a different story.
Parallel parking just isn't hard enough to justify the expense and complexity (same thing, really) of adding this device to a car. This is a lot of gizmosity to solve a problem that can be solved with a couple hours of practice on a quiet street.
Nowadays automated parallel parking is a relatively commonplace thing ("it's got smaht pahk!"[1]) and we have come full circle. Hardware complexity superseded by software complexity. Kinda neat.
Interestingly, automated parallel parking systems are allowed to be used during road licensing tests in the area where I live, to demonstrate parallel parking competency. Same goes for all driver aid systems, including Tesla FSD Beta etc. Bit of a head scratcher for me.
BMW has automated parallel parking, but I never use it because it is so slow. I love gadgets and automation so I tried, but I can’t in good conscience make everybody behind me wait while my car backs in at 2mph.
So I think it just depends. I had a 2016 Mercedes with it, and it was the slowest thing in the world - I would parallel park myself twice in the time it took to do it once. But now I have a 2020 Volvo XC60 and it's very fast and reliable, I have no issues using it even in heavy traffic , it doesn't feel like I'm holding up people while parking.
Get a Tesla, my 2015 Model S is easily faster then me, especially if the space is only just big enough. The first time I tried it I was so surprised by how quick it was that I stamped on the brake!
Symptom of a car dependent society I guess. Driving is a prerequisite for being an autonomous adult here (a state in the northeastern United States) so licensing requirements are mind bogglingly relaxed, and once you've passed the test once you can renew your license infinitely until you die.
This approach really shows when you use our public roads. People largely either do not know all the rules and best practices, or don't care to follow them.
Watching Russian dashcam videos you'd think people found their licenses in a cereal box yet it requires a stern test with theoretical questions of the form "Here is an intersection, one street has a rail line, there are an ambulance, a fire truck, a military column and a bus on each side, who has the right of way?" (and the answer is that it's a bus because even though the fire truck would have a right of way normally it loses it because it would need to cross the rail line as specified in the Chapter 8.19.75 of the Federal Rules of the Road). And the driving part involves driving a manual transmission vehicle without power anything through an obstacle course.
So I would not correlate the driving test difficulty with the behavior on the roads.
Interestingly the Russian dashcam phenomenon is similar to "florida man" - it's availability bias. Florida has more published wacky crime stories partly because of their public records policy, and Russia has a lot of dashcams due to there being a lot of insurance fraud with pedestrians being "hit" by cars.
I don't think that's right. In Poland the theoretical test is just as stupid as OP said, with a lot of "gotcha" questions designed specifically to catch you out, and yet people pass without bribery and then drive like bellends on the road. Having said that, people drive very aggressively and frequently are inconsiderate, but I'd say they absolutely know what the rules are - they just choose to ignore them because they think they can.
In my US state (which is nationally renown for its authoritarianism) you only ever have "gotcha" questions for stupid stuff that doesn't actually matter on the road. Like "what is the maximum sentence someone with one DUI 366 days, but not more than 24mo ago can receive", as if that actually matters on the road. It would be a lot more palatable if it was some obscure questions about a 5-way intersection with a light only controlling a fraction of the streets or something about a rail crossing and a drawbridge.
A different country, similar test. I remember you would just memorize the questions and their right answers. There was a limited set of questions, publicly available.
Most definitely, which would be the same if something like that had been enforced in the US. We'd have some "Driving Schools", which would "guarantee" your license or something like that. Though people would have likely voted the government out first, but looking at the building codes I am not 100% confident.
Quality depends heavily on how corrupt your government is — in Germany, these strict tests are actually that strict and work well. But obviously not everyone can get a license due to this. (e.g., I opted not to spend the 2000€ that a license would cost).
More the latter.
There are mandatory hours of training in specific conditions before being allowed to take the actual exam.
Driving hours with the instructor aren't cheap.
Don't know about russia, but in my country plenty of people driving without a license or with a suspended one. Also, no limit on how many times you can take the written exam, so someone maybe had to take it ten times, got lucky with the questions or memorised all intersections and passed. The more academic folk ace the written exam, but then struggle with the driving part. And when you fail the driving part, you don't need to revisit the quiz portion, just the driving. Someone who passed their driving test after 5-6 attempts rarely tends to be a good driver.
Is there actually a strong correlation between what people intuitively think of as a good or bad driver and that driver's accident rate or accident severity?
Outside the obvious extremely bad drivers (old people who are practically blind, people who habitually text and drive, people who drive at huge speeds above other traffic even in traffic to dense to really be doing that effectively, etc), probably not.
Imagine if a few had gone mainstream though: it looks like they could parallel park so tight that cars in front of or behind might be unable to get out.
That happens all the time without the system though. People who drive tiny little cars that turn on a dime routinely underestimate the space it takes for a big van or whatever to get out.
Does he? He said imagine if that feature is mainstream - so I'm assuming other cars also have this system.
Also, I don't understand why you'd blame the system if anyone gets "trapped" - you have your own eyes, no? Even when you park manually you have to judge if others can still leave. If the computer parks for you in such a way that makes others unable to leave.....then park somewhere else????? What is it with absolving people of personal responsibility all the time.
If it had multiple wheels or would allow you to turn the wheels 90deg so that you can slide sideways into a parking spot there might be a case for a system like that. I guess about half a cars length is needed as padding for a parking spot, so having a bumper to bumper system would unlock an extra 33% parking spaces which would be huge.
Unfortunately the system in the video still requires a significant bit of space.
1. Thinking about having to parallel park makes sure you are less likely to bump the cars in front and behind. Moving the front in and then swinging the back in seems like a good way to swing the back into another car.
2. Parking wasn't as much of a nightmare in the early 30s. Then WWII happened and that metal would have been an excess. By the 50s it was a "failed" idea.
Having 90 degree car wheels (that can only go 90 degrees at ~rest) combined with the sensors on a modern EV might make it feasible. But I'm not a mechanical engineer so "90 degree car wheels" might have some other feasibility problems, even at rest.
>Having 90 degree car wheels (that can only go 90 degrees at ~rest) combined with the sensors on a modern EV might make it feasible. But I'm not a mechanical engineer so "90 degree car wheels" might have some other feasibility problems, even at rest.
Should be easily possible to get almost the same effect on any RWD car if the engineers feel like designing for it (they don't). It's just a matter of allowing enough steering angle (amount depends on wheelbase). Every forklift made in the last 70yr can pivot about one of the non-steering wheels if you turn the wheel far enough. Some commercial trucks have enough steering angle to get almost the same effect (though they're much longer so the required angle is less) With ABS to brake the pivot point wheel it would be pretty graceful and you'd avoid the "just plowing straight" that forklifts tend to do when you try and crank the steering to max on anything other than pavement.
But there would be a lot of tradeoffs in order to get the range of motion you'd need out of the steering wheels so it makes sense that they don't.
When something has been around for a while but never caught on we're usually quite dismissive by default, usually on the assumption that it never caught on for a reason. Think of your own reaction the last time 3D TV's were hot.
Things will usually fail for the same reason again and agian unless there's been a fundamental change to make it more feasible, like battery tech making the latest round of electric vehicles successful.
Reversing cameras essentially have the same function. They are amazing too btw. The one change to cars in the past 50 years that i really care about.
I don't mind having a carburetor. I don't mind wind down windows. I don't mind manual gearboxes. But I demand reversing cameras. It lets you know exactly where the car is as you parallel park.
There was another idea I remember reading about in the 70s or 80s in (I think) Omni Magazine: Four wheel steering: All four wheels can be rotated. with the steering wheel. Turn the wheels to a full 90° and you can then move the car sideways into a parallel space. A lot more practical than this plan which pretty much destroys all the trunk space. Especially, with an EV where you can connect motors directly to each wheel, I can see this working out very nicely.
That vehicle is a remarkable technical achievement. It weighs 9,000 pounds, has 1000 horsepower, costs around US$100,000, and goes from 0 to 60 MPH in 3 seconds. It handles well, using an active suspension system to hide some of the problems of moving so much mass around. The stopping distance is rather long, though.
CNN calls it "a brilliant execution of a terrible idea."
I had hoped an electric vehicle future would have meant a lot less road noise but if everything is clocking in curb weights in excess of 5,000 lbs I guess it won’t be as serene as I dreamed. Sad.
I don't know if this is true or not, but I beg you, don't post comments like this. It's a question, and you could've spent the extra minute of research to _actually find out_ and post that.
This way we are left with negative value: We don't know any better, and instead are mentally burdened with speculation, that we have to actively work to not muddle up with what we know later on.
I think you'll find that powering a wheel through a full 90 degrees about a vertical axis would be extremely challenging before the availability of electric motors.
Hell, just creating a linkage that allows it to turn that much and also maintains any kind of reasonable suspension geometry and the required clearances, etc at non-extreme angles would be tricky.
The advantages of four wheel steering at driving speeds are largely (completely?) negated by active traction control (supplying power and breaking to each wheel independently). You're not going to see a car turn its wheels 90 degrees because of both the large space needed (the cavity for the wheel to turn in) plus the complexity of linkages that can handle that amount of turning.
This idea might make more sense today than it did back in the day because you can put a small electric hub-motor on the fifth wheel. Downside is that cars are far heavier now than in the 30s so you'd need a beefier lift for the fifth wheel.
[edit]
Looks like Porsche and Renault offer 4-wheel steering in their high-end cars today, which suggest I am wrong about active traction control completely negating the advantages at high speeds.
The 4-wheel steering on modern cars is typically to help with low speed turning circle size on longer wheelbase cars, not really for high-speed performance although they do put it to use at high speeds for some marginal benefits.
The Japanese cars (Mitsubishi and Acura) that had 4-wheel steering only used a very narrow range of deflection to the wheels. It was intended to adjust cornering but not designed for major off-axis motion.
I remember seeing something similar on Beyond 2000 back in the 80s. It was a set of small, swivelable wheels that deployed and allowed you to slew your car into the space.
I wonder how much more functionality would be needed on top of a state-of-the-art active suspension, to enable the car to "walk" sideways into a parking spot.
I had this random shower thought the other day that electric cars could easily have more than (powered) 4 wheels. Then I realized they are plenty fast already...
When you wanted to leave, he would likewise push cars in front or behind you to widen the slot where you were, making it easy for you to pull out.