Can you park your car in your garage and still get out??

julie2710

After suggesting in a previous thread that cars have got bigger and parking spaces are smaller, the ultimate proof will be how many people can actually park their cars in their garages and still manage to get out?
Double garages with one car parked in don't count - you would have to be able to park 2 next to each other and access both!

swake

I am friends with someone who works in in car design and he has told me before in regards to your point that they work within very strict parameters. While he has certain restrictions with what he can design he has said that cars in general have consistently become larger over the last decade. There is however a a cut off point due to the size of roads and such that obviously dictates how wide a car can be.

My friend works for a high end company and during customer feed back sessions a large percentage of people often find there new car doesnt fit into their garage. Mind you they tend to have the money to remedy those kind of situations though.

BargainGalore

I seem to recall reading some where than many new builds that have garages cant be used as a garage but they are built for storage

My garage should be okay although I have never used it. I have two but one cant be used for a car due to over garage being built on side of house

sarahg1969

We live in a new-build and our garage has now been partly converted, but there was no way we could ever have got either of our cars into it and got out. A neighbour has a Nissan Almera, and when he parks in his garage, he lets his wife out of the passenger side on the drive, pulls in the wing mirror and drives right up to the left-hand wall. And he squeeeeeezes out of the teeny space that's left for him. I don't know why he bothers. And why does he not have all the junk that we have in our garage?

SailorSam

When we were building the garage, it's a large garden, we bought the roof joists as a job lot off a builder, and then built the garage to suit these. It's 20'x25', a couple of brickies who came to give quotes thought we were building another house.
Have thought a couple of times if it would pay to convert it to a granny flat.

Nilrem

My dad had our garage built as suitable for 2.5 Ford Transits back in the late 80's, so we can get in/out with ease (although it might be a bit tight if it was just a single width).

However most of the garages on our street that were built when the houses were are quite tight (early 70's), and the garages around where my nan lived and parents lived before moving to the current house won't even accept a modern car through the doorway - I think they were built in the late 60's when the morris minor etc were the average car.

I think the problem with garages is three fold.
1: Most older garages are very tight with modern cars (I suspect the width has increased a fair bit between the 60's and 80's).
2: Even modern garages tend to be built just wide enough for the average car - no allowance made for opening the door, apart from that required to build the garage (6 inches for the door frame, and about 3 for a brick pillar).
3: A lot are very tight to get into - especially if there is a block of them separate from the houses, they tend to be in rows about 1.5 car lengths apart facing each other, which can be a nightmare with some cars.

When we first got our current car we parked it in my sisters garage just down the road, and it was not fun getting it in, as you had to negotiate a fairly narrow road with cars parked on it, then a tight turn into the garage area, then try and turn a 14-15 foot car in a space of about 20-22 feet to get it into the garages.

Basically, back to the original question, I suspect the average car size has probably increased since the 60's, although I doubt they can get much larger and still be legal without a change in the licences/roads.

I also believe that any new garage built should be, by law able to actually take a modern, average sized car (Ford Focus, Astra/Vectra etc), and if not built to take them should be called something else, how about "additional storage that we couldn't be bothered to build to proper housing standards as it would have cost us money, and meant that we couldn't lie through our teeth and tell the planning officials we were ging to have 2 parking spaces instead of 1".

On a semi related note, I had to laugh the other day - our local paper had an article where the local fire service have apparently issued a warning to the affect that they cannot get into a lot of the new housing estates at night.
Apparently some bright spark (no pun intended) decided that they should be built to encourage people to use public transport, so only one parking space each - two problems there, 1: we don't have great public transport, 2: we're a "commuter" town, most people don't work in the town and drive out to work (so most residents have 2 cars).

I swear a lot of planning officials don't know much about the towns their decisions affect, and don't have much common sense.
It didn't take a genius to work out the new estates were going to have serious problems with parking/emergency services (especially given we'd already got that problem on much older estates built before the car was as common).

indiegirl_2

No, this is one of my bugbears. I have an average mid-sized 5dr family hatchback, and a garage built in the mid 80s (separate from the house).

I can get the car in, but can't get out once in, unless I perform acrobatics over to the back seat and out of the rear doors. When parked, the front doors align with the two main side supporting pillars, reducing the opening gap to about 2inches. No amount of contortionism will get me out of there!

I am buying an Aygo in the near future so should have some more luck on this front!

trisontana

You get the same problem in some older multi-story car parks. The parking spaces are usually determined by the distance between the concrete pillars. When these were built the usual layout was three parking spaces between a pair of pillars. That worked twenty years ago. But now, with larger cars, those spaces are very tight. The only solution is to only have two spaces between each pillar, but, of course, you then drastically reduce the capacity of that car park.

Abbafan1972

We don't have a garage, but if we did and it was too small for a car, then I would prefer to convert it to an extra room.

roddydogs

Im amazed that 60% have "Loads of Room", obviously not 30s built, when cars were much slimmer.

soolin

Plenty of room in my garage but the house is old and although the garage is not original it was still built in the 1930s40s and I believe intended for storage as well as for a car. We have a Citroen C8 in there as well as kitchen cabinets for storage and 5 push bikes along the side wall.

However the house we let out is only 20 years old and the C8 can get in the garage, just but it is impossible to open the doors even a small amount.