Every motorist is all too familiar with the scenario: With great difficulty you try to manoeuvre the car into a too narrow space as traffic builds up behind and impatient motorists blow the horn angrily at you in a bid to hurry you on.
All that frustration is a thing of the past with the Park Assist that can be ordered as an option for only BD147.
Volkswagen has managed to much improve the system first introduced by Toyota in the Prius.
In contrast to the complicated camera assisted Prius system where the driver has to enter the parking parametres on a touchscreen monitor, the VW Touran system is dead simple to use, almost automatically parking the car.
The Park Assist is activated by pressing a button below the gear lever. Ultrasonic sensors around the car then start scanning parking space on the passenger side of the vehicle. Once a space measuring at least 5.80 metres long has been found, the system responds with a bleep. The system operates without cameras.
All the driver then needs to do is to flick the reverse gear and to operate the accelerator pedal. You take your hands off the steering wheel as the system takes over and does all the work for you, skillfully steering the vehicle into the parking space down to the exact centimetre. On average the entire procedure takes no more than 15 seconds. This correspondent has tried the system and it works. A precondition is that you keep a speed below 30kph when the system is switched on and keep a distance of at least half-a-metre and at most one metre to the parked vehicles.
It is a significant technological advance over the parking sensors fitted to the bumpers of many cars today that warn you with an acoustic signal if you come too close to bumping into a car parked in front or at the rear.
By Reino Gevers
