I have had this idea about parking a car...

Most people have proprioception - you know where the parts of your body are without looking. Close your eyes and you intuitively know where your hands and fingers are.

When parking a car, it helps to sort of sit in the drivers seat and look around the car. Turn your neck and look past the back seat where your rear tire would be. sense the edges of the car.

I think if you sort of develop this a bit you might "feel" where your car is intuitively when pulling into a parking space or parallel parking. (car-prioception?)

(but use your mirrors and backup camera anyway)

As someone who hasn't had to own a car in over 8 years (lived in NYC) and recently bought a 2023 Hyundai Santa Fe with birdseye view parking it shocks me how uncalibrated my car-prioception is.

It's made me realize that objects are much further from the boundaries of my car when backing into a spot parallel parking. I would never think to get so close to another car if I had to only rely on my own senses.

With that said, I realize there's a significant number of people that are even poorer estimators of these distances than myself. I.e. those that won't pass through two cars even though to me it's obvious that they could easily pass.

I have to imagine a big part of this has to do with risk assessment and lack of risk-free practice opportunity IRL. Nobody is seeing how far they can push or train themselves in this regard when the consequences are to scratch up your car and others' cars. With the birdseye view I can actually do that now!