Parking Sensors. A Trust Issue.

Because I have a hundred children we have an enormous car. That and because we live in London where you always park on the street and often need to fit into a parking spot only inches bigger than your car, you need a car with parking sensors. I do anyway.

We recently bought a new car because I had an unfortunate incident where a motorcyclist got in the way of the bus lane I wanted to pull across. So apart from kick arse cup holders my only other request for our new car was parking sensors on both the front and the rear of our new tank.

Touch wood aside from trashing all four wheels on the kerb, and one slight scrape along a bollard, I have not hit any other stationary (or moving) objects and it’s all down to our new flash parking sensors that also has a screen on the dashboard that shows a diagram of my car and how far something is away from me. It’s brilliant.

Like most sensors, it beeps at you when you’re a couple of feet away from something and as you get closer the beeps get closer together until it’s one long beep, like a flatline, basically telling you if you go any further you’re going to hit something. And if you’re totally stupid you can see it for yourself on the little TV in front of you.

Fool proof really.

You’d have thought.

The problem is that Rob doesn’t trust the sensors. When he’s reverse parking he swings the car around really quickly as though he’s in a two-seater and when the sensors start beeping he keeps going back and I can feel my anxiety rising until the beeeeeeeeeeeep flatline noise starts and that’s my cue to start yelling “ARE YOU GOING TO STOP OR NOT?”, to which he usually replies “there’s still heaps of room”.

Now I am baffled by this and as I always say to him, do the makers of parking sensors lie? Do they just make the really loud flatline noise to say ‘well keep going, mate, you’ve got another half a foot left, don’t mind me’ and have they just put that parking system screen on the dashboard for decorative value?

I think not.

Hence the award for ‘who crashed the new car into another car first’ goes to Rob.

I was there, I witnessed it and my God it felt good to turn around smugly and say … 

“what did I tell you?”

But more than that I am just so glad he crashed it first. Never saw that one coming.

Always trust technology I say.