My wife recently went downtown to our small town for a meeting, parallel parked her car in the rather generous space and reviewed he notes (she was early) and watched in amazement as a C-class Mercedes (the small sedan) proceeded to spend over 5 minutes trying to unsuccessfully parallel park into a space large enough for a full size pickup. The person eventually gave up and drove away. In Florida. At least he didn’t hit the car already parked in front.
Thanks @VDCdriver for posting that.
It sure did give me an early morning laugh.
I thought for sure she was going to straighten back out, pull up one foot farther and try the whole process again.
Now I’ve got a headache though from laughing so hard.
Yosemite
I didn’t make it past half way, and I bet I didn’t miss anything. I’ll bet the driver wanted to back in to make it easy to get out of the spot. It seems like pulling straight in would have been easier on both ends, though.
^
Unfortunately…no.
It would have been somewhat logical for her to go through at least some of those maneuvers if she wanted to back into the space. However, when all was said and done, she drove–frontwards–into the totally unobstructed space on the far left that she could have driven into directly in the early part of the video.
You were being logical, but apparently logic played no part in her maneuvering.
Truly…bizarre…
I wish a video like this was unique but sadly it is not. There are a lot of them and I wish they were funny, not depressing.
As much trouble as they’re having in the parking lot at slow speed one has to wonder what their open road driving habits are like; assuming they still have a pulse at this point in time and not under 6 feet of freshly dug earth.
C’mon, guys, don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on the young lady? It’s entirely possible that her dad was doing drive time with her during the learning process. I spent many, many hours teaching each of my kids (40 hours were required if I remember correctly, but I did many more) and I can guarantee they had their problems learning to back up… especially my daughter, who doesn’t have the innate math and physics talents that my son has. The only way I could teach her to parallel park was to buy three toy cars, one with steerable wheels, set up a street on the kitchen table using wooden sticks, and showing her how the most common mistakes cause difficulty and how to do it correctly… by teaching her how the wheels will track when you turn going backwards. It worked beautifully, but without going through hat exercise she probably never would have learned. Backing up is tough for many young people.
I’m glad nobody ever taped some of the embarrassing things I did.
my dad grabbed a couple of plastic trash cans, set them up, and taught me to parallel park
I don’t remember how I learned, but I’ve always had a good sense of spacial relationships and good mechanical aptitude, so figuring out where the wheels would track was second nature to me. I don’t remember not being able to parallel park.
But trust me, when it comes to understanding financial issues and human nature I’m as much a duck out of water as the young lady in the video is trying to back up.
We learned that in drivers training. It was two guys and one girl. We all learned to park and back.
She really only made one big mistake that led to all the others. She didn’t pull up far enough before starting to back up, then became more confused and flustered.
