Park & Hide – Honey, I lost the car

UK motorists spend 35 million hours a year looking for their parked cars, according to new research.

The survey of 2,000 drivers commissioned by Nissan GB revealed more than a third regularly forget where their car is parked, and on average ‘lose’ their vehicle once a month.

A further one in 20 said they struggle to locate their parked car on a weekly basis.

According to the data, it commonly takes 10 minutes to find a lost parked vehicle, although 5% of respondents admitted searching for over half an hour on occasion.

The research comes ahead of Super Saturday (also known as Panic Saturday) on December 22 – Britain’s busiest shopping day before Christmas, where last minute gift buyers will fill up car parks.

Multi-storey car parks were revealed as the most common location to lose a car, closely followed by shopping centres and supermarket car parks.

Places most likely to lose a car

1. Multi-storeys
2. Shopping centres
3. Supermarkets
4. Airports
5. Town/City Street

Now Nissan has come to the rescue with the latest version of the Qashqai crossover, now available with a new infotainment system with significantly enhanced functionality including a new mobile application called Door to Door Navigation.

The app includes a ‘Find My Car’ function which allows the driver to locate and be guided to their parked connected car.

When you want to return to your car, simply search for a destination on the app. It will then guide you to your car – first with a walking route and then once in the car, driving directions will appear via the in-car navigation. The walking route is available if the user is within 3.1 miles/5 km of the car.

“The research highlights how common it is to forget where you parked, but modern in-car connectivity and smartphone apps let drivers use simple technology to mitigate against this sort of motoring pitfall,” said Arun Prasad of Nissan GB.