Am I the only one who has trouble parking new aerodynamic cars with lots of curved surfaces? I have driven many cars/trucks in my lifetime, some of them kinda sorta curvy. I have never had a problem parking straight and smack dab in the middle of a parking space.
I got this Mazda6 which has a really curved hood, really curved windshield, really curved dashboard that it is kinda high compared to the seat, really curved door panels that go up high, really curved roofline, etc. I got no reference point and I lose sight of the parking space lines almost at the beginning of my turn. All the sudden I am parking crazy like I just learned to drive. Am I just losing it?
No you’re not losing your mind. It’s happening to me too.
To prove my bonafides, I worked for many years as a hostler in a freight yard. My job was to grab the 18 wheelers as the drivers arrived and put them on the proper door. I also parked the local delivery trucks inside a warehouse for another company, so close together it was impossible to walk between them.
To put it bluntly… I can park vehicles. I’m a Jedi Master of this and have won quite a few bets in my driving life (once they didn’t believe I could back a doubles rig into a slot).
And I can’t get my wife’s Camry straight at the grocery store without opening the door and sighting along the parking stripe.
I just bought a new Ford Escape. I really like it, but I find I have a really hard time judging where the passenger-side tires are. I find that I scrape the curb a lot.
I also have a Mazda 6 and it took a while to get used to parking it, especially keeping it straight when reversing. I think it’s because the line along the bottom of the windows from the A-pillar to the C-pillar rises towards the back of the car. So if you look in the mirror and try to keep that line parallel with the curb you fail because it’s basically forming a triangle not a parallel set.
This is where the backup camera on my new car (Hyundai Sonata) really helps. I find myself backing into more spots now because I can line up the parking space lines with the range-finder lines and back in nearly perfectly straight and centered.
My problem with our Rogue is the dropped nose. I’m short, so when I pull into a parking space, I can’t see the front edge of the hood. So if there is a car in the spot in front of me, it’s total guesswork as to how close I am to him when I park. I’ve started using the on-board cameras.
Glad I’m not the only one who has trouble parking modern cars. I have a Chevy HHR, and that thing has NO reference points that can be used for precise location. The painted striping defining a parking space completely disappear if the car is within about 30 feet of the space, and guessing the distance between the front bumper and an obstacle are more of a SWAG than anything else. And I’m getting very familiar with the noise those rumble strips make when one drifts out of a lane.
I thought that all this was just a feature of an HHR - now I know a lot of modern cars have this problem. Don’t auto designers ever drive the stuff they design?
Yes, the convertible Mustang that I currently have use of has a tiny porthole. Like Shoeless, I briefly put the car into reverse to to checkout the lay of the land with the rear camera.
Actually, the Mustang is fairly easy to park, after the first week. The huge engine compartment stretching into infinity in front of the driver took a few days to get used to, but childhood parking reflexes came back pretty quickly.
I have the same problem with my Volkswagen Golf and had that problem with the Honda Fit that I owned before that - and I’m pretty much standard American male height (5’ 8").
Fortunately for me, both cars are tiny - and if somebody else had been in that parking spot beforehand, I’ve got all the room in the world there.
It looks like today’s Corolla is about 200 kg heavier, and gets a little bit better highway mileage than the 99, while delivering 16% more horsepower. You know where that better highway mileage likely comes from? Aerodynamics. The city mileage is a tad worse than then, but that can be attributed to the huge extra weight it has to accelerate after every stop.
Sure, some parts of the look have to do with looking cool or looking like a Korean boom box (Honda Civic, what happened to you, man?), but the exterior design guys don’t have free reign. They have to work with real engineers in order to deliver appropriate drag coefficient.
I dunno about that. The 1990 Mazda 626 4cyl got 17 city and 23 highway. The 2017 Mazda6 gets 26 city and 35 highway. Aerodynamics may have something to do with that. Have you noticed that cars within the same class have very similar silhouettes? It seems like everyone has to have the same shape to squeeze that extra 1 or 2 mpg out of the vehicle.
Aerodynamics have nothing to do with gas mileage! Well, at least as far as the EPA is concerned. And manufacturers don’t report “true” gas mileage. Just the EPA numbers. Other people like Consumer Reports do actual mileage tests, but those are (sadly) noise in the system and don’t affect the auto makers.
Why do you say this? Just because the EPA mileage test cycle uses a dyno?
But the test dyno isn’t just a passive lump of spinning mass, it’s set to provide a load that is a function of speed and acceleration for a given car. This includes measured aerodynamic loads.
