European Parking

In Europe, the only thing smaller than the cars are the parking spaces. It's impossible to use a car for any more than a month without sustaining some bumper scratches, because you absolutely must come into bumper-to-bumper contact with other cars in the course of normal use. I'd say that in 40% of trips I take in the car with another person, to facilitate entry and exit of the vehicle, the car is removed from the parking space before the passengers try to squeeze in, and the passengers get out before the car is squeezed into its space at the destination. And we have a pretty normal-to-small car in Europe, one that would be considered tiny in the United States. So you can imagine how impressed I was when I saw this Peugeot 1007 for the first time in the neighborhood a month ago. It truly is a car designed with the troubles of European parking in mind.

It's a standard compact car, but...the door slides open like a van! Necessity blah blah invention. Well done!

(note that the parking space in this photo is immense and not representative of the norm)

A rear shot I took to remember the model of the car. Cool cloud reflection was incidental.

And yesterday I saw a green one, the second 1007 in town, parking, and the guy got out and walked away, and the door slide shut and locked behind him. I know that modern minivans have this technology in the States, but good luck parking a minivan over here.

Peugeot has not (yet) paid me for this post, but 1,007€ seems like an appropriate sum.