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Brits spend 35 million hours a year looking for their parked cars, according to research.
A survey of 2,000 drivers revealed over one third regularly forget where their car is parked, and on average ‘lose’ their vehicle once a month.
A further one in 20 drivers 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 five percent of respondents admitted searching for over half an hour on occasion.
The figures result in 133,245,000 instances of ‘lost cars’ every year based on 32.9 million license holders in the UK.
The research comes ahead of Super Saturday, also known as Panic Saturday –
December 22nd - Britain’s busiest shopping day before Christmas, where last minute
gift buyers will fill up car parks.
Multi-story car parks were revealed as the most common location to lose a car, closely followed by shopping center and supermarket car parks.
Arun Prasad, a spokesman for Nissan GB, said: “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.”
The survey conducted via OnePoll also revealed other common places to lose a parked car are airports, town and city streets and concert venues.
Women are more likely to forget where they have parked with 72 percent saying they had at some point lost their vehicle, compared to 58 percent of men.
However, women take 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 percent of respondents have ever used this to its advantage and tracked the location of their vehicle.
When it comes to 25-34 year-olds, 16 percent, almost double the overall average said they have used a smartphone to find their car.
Arun Prasad added: “Through Nissan Intelligent Mobility, we’re changing the way we interact with our vehicles to benefit customer lives. Helping drivers easily locate their
car is just one of the many benefits.
“Nissan’s Door to Door Navigation application includes a ‘Find My Car’ function, that lets drivers locate and be guided to their parked car, saving both time and stress.”
ENDS