Don’t fat-shame your car – it’s keeping you safe

We’ve all been there. You pull off the perfect piece of parking; your car’s doors are precisely aligned with the white lines on the Tarmac, the spacing between yours and the cars on either side perfectly symmetrical.

But then you go to climb out and, holding your fingers between your door and the shiny paintwork of the car to your right, you find you can barely squeeze yourself out of the minuscule gap that’s left over.

Is it your imagination, or was getting out of the car in a car park always this hard? OK, you’re less limber now than perhaps you once were, and there’s an extra inch or so on the waistline to contend with – but that can’t be all it is, surely?

In fact, it isn’t just you that’s grown a bit tubby over the years. Your car has too. The modern automobile has grown larger as time has gone on ^[1] – a fact confirmed this week by consumer organisation Which?, which has carried out an analysis of all the cars on sale today and found that 161 of the models it tested are now too large to fit comfortably into a parking bay ^[2].

On the face of it, this “autobesity”, as it’s termed, is a problem. Larger cars are not just a pain in parking bays. They take up more space on the road, and make it harder for drivers to pass through narrow gaps. And as a rule – though not always – larger cars require more resources to build, consume more resources in their operation, and cause more damage to the road due to their extra weight ^[3].

0309 Cars too long for normal parking space ^[4]

So it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the “bloat” of modern cars is a bad thing. But that isn’t necessarily the case – and to understand why, it’s worth exploring the reasons for it.

Primary among those is crash protection. Cars are safer today than they ever have been, and part of that safety comes as a result of advances in construction techniques that lead to stronger passenger cells – the areas within which passengers sit – as well as more effective crumple zones, which dissipate energy before it can injure the occupants.

“Throughout the last 25 years there has been a significant increase in vehicle mass,” says Alex Thompson, the principal engineer for automotive safety at Thatcham Research, the UK’s leading car safety research organisation.

“This is in part due to the adoption of more substantial vehicle body structures, which can absorb more energy during an impact without the occupant compartment collapsing, offering greater protection to the driver and passengers. If you compare an A-pillar or B-pillar from a car 25 years ago to one today, you’ll notice a big difference in the size of those structures.

“What’s more, the further away an occupant is from the interior of the vehicle, the less likely they are to contact hard interior components during a collision, allowing restraint systems like seat belts and airbags to function effectively.

“This combination of bigger structures and more interior space has led to an increase in vehicle size. And this increase in weight has also seen a requirement for vehicle structures to accommodate larger braking systems and wheels.”

But increases in safety standards aren’t the only factor in the growth of our cars, as Steve Huntingford, the editor of What Car? magazine, points out. “I think the growth is being driven by three things,” he says. “There’s safety, but there’s also manufacturers not wanting to be left behind. If your rivals have made their cars bigger, you follow suit so the practicality of your car is comparable.”

Last year, the British Parking Association (BPA) published guidance recommending that the size of a standard parking bay be increased Credit: Alamy

Then there’s genuine customer demand – not only because people expect more space and comfort than they used to, but also due to the rise in the popularity of the SUV ^[5]. And if it helps to know you’re not the only one, Huntingford points out that even his team of road testers struggle with the realities of growing cars every day.

“We’re reminded of how big cars are getting every time we park something in the What Car? overflow car park, because that was built in the 1970s and is sized to suit vehicles of the era,” he says. “Park some modern luxury SUVs in there, and they touch the lines on either side of a space.

“For this reason, I would be in favour of making parking spaces bigger; yes, you’ll lose some capacity, but not as much as you do by having every other space rendered unusable unless people climb out of their sunroofs.”

The British Parking Association (BPA) would seem to agree. Last October, it published new guidance recommending that the size of a standard parking bay be increased by 20cm (about 7¾in) in both width and length.

“Larger parking bays will make it easier for everyone to navigate into and out of spaces, and reduce the risk of damage to other vehicles when opening doors,” said Dave Smith, the BPA’s head of marketing and communications, at the time the new guidance was issued. “It will also hopefully mean that drivers are not spending lots of time circling around looking for spaces that they can easily access. The irony is that the future may see a trend for self-parking cars, which will mean the width of a parking bay will be less of an issue.” Well yes, except that humans will still have to be able to squeeze out of their vehicles.

Smith isn’t the only one who thinks salvation may come in the form of technological advances. As Huntingford puts it: “The good news is that modern cars aren’t just larger on the outside; they are more spacious inside, too. And thanks to the small size of electric motors, there’s the potential for further gains here without further exterior growth.”

Modern cars are undoubtedly bigger than they were before, then, but that isn’t such bad news as it might at first appear. With that growth in size has come ostensible improvement. Customers want more space and more toys, and they’re getting them. They – and regulators – also demand more safety.

The laws of physics dictate that those things cannot come without a size penalty. But there is still hope; the cars of the future may deliver the same sorts of advances while taking up no more space than they do today.

In the meantime, parking bays are getting bigger, and self-parking systems may well mean you can climb out of your car even before it’s in the bay, letting it do the rest on its own. Technology, it seems, has the answers. Now, if only it could do something about those extra inches on our waistlines …

References

^{^} The modern automobile has grown larger as time has gone on (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^{^} 161 of the models it tested are now too large to fit comfortably into a parking bay (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^{^} cause more damage to the road due to their extra weight (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^{^} 0309 Cars too long for normal parking space (cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk)
^{^} SUV (www.telegraph.co.uk)