A Freedom of Information (FOI) request revealed that five councils in England—Wokingham, South Hampshire, Broadland, South Suffolk, and West Devon—have banned vehicles longer than five metres from using their car parks.
This might signal a broader move to restrict longer vehicles from parking in these areas, as 91% of councils reported no plans to expand the size of parking bays in major towns and cities.
Vehicles affected by this ban include popular models like the Mercedes S-Class, Range Rovers, Tesla Model S, BMW 7 Series, Audi A8, Rolls Royce Cullinan, and Kia EV9. Many premium sports cars and SUVs also exceed the five-meter length limit.
According to This is Money, the average length for standard off-street parking spaces is about 4.8 meters.
The FOI request by Autocar aimed to determine if there were any future plans to increase parking bay sizes, noting that many haven't been updated in decades. Since the 1970s, the smallest parking spaces have been 2.5 meters wide and 4.8 meters long, but cars have grown considerably over the past 50 years.
Most on-street parking spaces are even shorter and narrower than bay parking spaces. Research by Transport & Environment (T&E) released in January 2024 shows that cars are getting 1 cm wider every two years, making them increasingly unsuitable for many parking spaces. This trend is driven by the growing popularity of SUVs.
In the first half of 2023, the average width of new cars increased to 180.3 cm, up from 177.8 cm in 2018. Data from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) confirms this trend over the past two decades. New cars in the EU and Great Britain are subject to the same maximum width, 255 cm, as buses and trucks.
T&E's research found that 52% of the top 100 models sold in 2023 were too wide for the minimum on-street parking space size (180 cm) in major cities like London, Paris, and Rome.
Read the full list of the top offending cars that are too big for UK parking spaces.,