UK drivers spend ’35 million hours a year’ looking for parked cars, survey claims

Survey finds more than one third regularly forget where their car is parked

Many smartphones allow motorists to track the location of their car from an app (SWNS/Nissan)

Britons spend 35 million hours a year looking for their parked cars, according to a survey of 2,000 drivers which also found that more than one third regularly forgot where their car is parked and on average “lose” their vehicle once a month.

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

It commonly took them 10 minutes to find a lost parked vehicle, although five per cent of respondents admitted searching for over half an hour on occasion.

The research comes ahead of 22 December, Britain’s busiest shopping day before Christmas, where last minute gift buyers are expected to fill up car parks.

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

“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, a spokesperson for Nissan GB, which commissioned the poll.

The survey also revealed other common places to lose a parked car were airports, town and city streets, and concert venues.

Women were more likely to forget where they parked with 72 per cent saying they had at some point lost their vehicle, compared to 58 per cent of men.

However, women took less time to find their cars, taking on average 8.8 minutes in comparison to men taking 11.9 minutes.

Despite in-car and smartphone technology enabling motorists to log their parked car, only nine per cent of respondents had ever used this to their advantage and tracked the location of their vehicle.

When it came to 25-34 year olds, 16 per cent, almost double the overall average said they had used a smartphone to find their car.

SWNS