Any tips for manoeuvring a wide, long car?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was thinking today, as I tentatively reversed my S-type jaguar into a spot…

Am I about to shorten the life of my tires by mouting the curb?

Am I about to hit the car I’m reversing towards?

Is my car going to be ‘straight’ when this is over?

And then the thought which is relevant to this thread entered my head…

Is there inside knowledge about car manoeuvring that I could tap into?

**

When I was learning to drive my instructor gave me inside knowledge about his particular car that would help me reverse park. But this information was utterly useless for other cars. It was only useful for his car. So in a way this was a not very good instuctor. But if you think of it another way he was a good instructor because he’d give you the skills to get beyond your test (in Britain the test is done in the instructor’s car, not BY the instructor, but in his or her car)

But the car I drive (and also the previous car) was a shitload bigger than the one I learned in so I lack confidence in situations where you need to judge the size of the car you are inside (and therefore blind to what it is doing from the outside)

Touch wood: So far I have been pretty good in this regard. But I put that down to sheer luck.

2

You just get used to it. I had a ‘64 Oldsmobile that was a boat, I think it was 220’’ long, with no power steering, and I could maneuver it through rush hour traffic and parallel park easily, after some time. Hopping the curb a bit parking regular is fine, as long as you don’t care about scratching your wheels.

3

Watch how truckers drive. They operate VERY big machines in very small spaces.

As a generality, to manuever a big machine in a small space, you use a lot more steering. You don’t cut corners, you go deep into them and then turn sharply. Think more like marching than wandering.

For example, in a small car, you can pull into a typical 45-degree parking spot by driving fairly close to the back of the other parked cars, and making a gradual turn into the space. In a big car, you need to start farther away from the parked cars. I.e. the right side of your car needs to be farther from the back bumper of the others. Since your car is also wider, that means your face & butt need to be a lot further from the parked cars than you’re used to.

Then, instead of turning in where you mormally wold, you go a few inches farther, and then really crank the wheel over. Like full-lock or almost that much. By making the turn sharper, you get aligned sooner. Which lets you get a long vehicle into a narrow space.

Whenever I see a large car parked badly in a space with the right rear too far right and the left front too far left, I know they drove their big car using small-car style. Soccer Moms-n-Dads in SUVs are real good at that. Folks, it isn’t a Celica anymore.
Bottom line: Make larger, sharper maneuvers. Which also means, at least at first, going a little slower so you have time to react correctly to the more dynamic situation you’re creating.

Backing is conceptually similar.

4

Years ago I volunteered to drive a church school bus. I had to get a special state bus license to do this, so took some training. If you think it is hard to park a Jag, you should try parallel parking a school bus! In practice, they made me park my own car in the back of the space, and that certainly made me careful in doing this.

Just like all such parking, it takes practice. Find a street with little traffic, find a spot with a two or three-car space, and practice there until you can do it smoothly. Good luck.

5

Seriously, you have to learn your own car. I see this with people all the time and it drives me batshit crazy, how can people not learn the size of their own damn car?

You take your car to an area where you can get in and out of it frequently without distubing traffic. Empty parking lots are good for this. Go to the edge of the pavement, whether it’s a curb or grass, and get out to see how close you are compared to how close you thought you were when you stopped. You can practice paralell parking this way. You can even take some folding chairs with you to use as if they were the bumpers on other parallel cars and practice that way.

You have to figure out what parts of your car you can see from your driver’s seat, which you can use as reference points for how close to things you are.

For instance, on my Mustang, I could use the passenger’s side windshield wiper hinge as a reference for whether I was too close to parallel parked cars along a city street. I used the ridges on the hood to tell how close I was to the left curb when parallel parking. I knew to cut into parallel spaces when my passenger’s mirror was even with the other car’s rear bumper.

Get someone to help you. Take a few minutes in a parking lot that’s full and go in and out of spaces to see how close you really are to the other cars. Have the other person go out there and indicate to you how close you are to the car in front of you, on your right, left, rear. Or do it yourself and get out of the car periodically to see where you are. Learn reference points around your car that you can use from the driver’s seat to tell how close you are to things.

It’s really the only way to gain confidence in your driving, and to help yourself from not looking like a total idiot when you have to pass a double parked car, and there’s plenty of room to do it, but you never learned how much space your car takes up, so you sit there like a dummy honking at the double-parked empty car, while people behind you are honking at you and yelling that “YOU HAVE PLENTY OF ROOM!!! GET MOVING OR GET YOUR ASS OUT OF THE WAY!!!”

Living on a one-way street with congested parking, I see this all the time. If I happen to be walking by at the right time, AND feeling charitable (not very often), I’ll even go out in the street in front of the offending vehicle and indicate to the driver how much space they have on each side. It’s usualy at LEAST a foot, sometimes as much as THREE FEET. I think they end up feeling pretty dumb once they get through unscathed and with the help of this grumpy woman.

So, please do your fellow road warriors a favor and try these exercises, learn your vehicle, and save yourself some face.

Your instructor couldn’t possibly have given the information he gave you about any other car except his. All makes and models are different. He expected you to extrapolate his information and apply it appropirately to your own. And you have to do the same for every vehicle you drive. And what works for a tall driver won’t work for a short driver, and so on.

6

Every time you park, get out and look at how close you really were, when you thought you were close to crunching. Get back in the car, look around, and think, “this is what it looks like when I’m that close.”

Pick out a mark on your hood to line up with the far side of your lane while driving. After a while, you won’t need the mark.

Get a pair of little convex mirrors to stick to the outside lower corner of your side mirrors. They let you see the painted line at the edge of the space without craning your neck out the window.

Good luck!

7

I espcially like LSLGuys advice. Keep in mind that your front wheels are manoeuvrable, while your rear wheels are along for the ride. That’s why truckers take the wide corners. Your car isn’t that big, but the concept is the same.

If you think about the highway on/off ramps (the circular ones) lots of people cut the corners because they are looking at where the front of the car is and making it follow the inside radius. If you drive the ramps thinking about the path that the rear wheels follow, then you find your front wheels closer to the centre of the lane. The same is true when parking.

To make it easier, make sure that you are backing in when you have the opportunity. It is loads easier than trying to pull in forwards and straighten out.

As for trying to figure out the size of your car, take a look at the back of your window and project the rest of your trunk beyond that. Looking at the side of the car from the outside will give you some sense of just how much past that point it ends.

Here’s a sneaky trick that I used to use to impress my wife. When parallel parking on the street, take a look at any reflection you can see in windows that may be nearby. About half the time shop windows provide a clear reflection of my car and the one immediately behind me, meaning I can see just how close I am to it.

Practice, practice, practice.

8

I keep my passenger-side mirror tilted down a bit so I can see the curb as I park.

9

You let me know. I have a 66 Cadillac hearse. I park with a map, a calendar, and a sextant.

:smiley:

10

Get on the TT course and try and keep up with the motorbikes. :wink: