In news that’s unlikely to surprise anybody, a recent survey has found one in 10 Australians have admitted to being terrible at parallel parking and even more alarmingly, almost a third don’t know how to change a tyre.
Research conducted by eBay has delved into the driving habits of Australians, unearthing some troubling issues that could come down to a lack of proper training or reliance on technologies to do what drivers were taught to do themselves some time ago.
When it came to parallel parking, 12 per cent of those surveyed admitted to being either incompetent or extremely incompetent at parallel parking. And according to the survey, South Australia was home to the least confident parallel parkers, with one in five counting themselves as totally hopeless at the task.
Most interesting was that manual drivers were three times more confident at parallel parking than automatic drivers.
These days, a lot of new cars come with automatic parallel parking technology that allows the vehicle to enter and exit a parking space with the driver not needing to use their hands.
The other alarming stat to come out of the survey was regarding changing tyres.
Almost 30 per cent of respondents had no idea how to change a tyre and wheel – quite shocking, considering these people may not know whether their spare tyre is in good condition.
According to eBay, Victorians were the biggest buyers of tyre repair kits, while Queenslanders were the biggest buyers of spare tyre kits.
