The Impassioned Debate: Self-Driving Cars Parking Head-In Versus Nose Out

A parking lot can become a feuding landscape akin to the Old West and the infamous rivalry between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Danger lurks as cars jockey to park, trolling to get that nifty open parking spot nearest to the front entrance and avoid having to park at the furthermost spaces that require a seemingly unending and endurance-busting walk across a massive-sized parking lot. Drivers eye each other warily. Civility generally seems to have gone out the window. The act of parking is a daily exhibition of the dog-eat-dog world in which we live.

There is an added twist that can really get people’s goat.

Should you park your car in a head-in manner, or should you instead utilize the reverse arrangement whereby you back into a parking space?

This has become a longstanding question and an erstwhile and irksome choice, and abundantly is worthy of the Hatfield-McCoy kind of enmity. Almost any driver that you might come upon has an opinion on this fierce debate conundrum. Some drivers swear an eternal oath to the head-in parking approach and eschew the nose out as an alternative. Meanwhile, some drivers have an ironclad belief in the nose out parking, lamenting that the head-in technique is rife with problems and ought to be banned from existence.

The two camps are usually vocally adamant and diametrically opposed to each other. It can get darned ugly.

For the head-in camp, they argue that it makes obvious sense to drive your car forward into a parking spot. Doing so allows you to clearly see whether the spot is fully open and unobstructed. You can also smoothly enter into a parking space and adroitly align yourself to provide maximum distance between the cars on either side of you. The beauty too is that if you want to use your trunk, such as getting out some heavy winter jackets for the cold walk through the parking lot or to place packages into the trunk upon your return to the parked car, it is easy-peasy to do so.

They admit freely that backing out of the parking spot is a bit delicate. Nonetheless, if one carefully and slowly goes in reverse, paying attention to what is behind you, the exit-without-incident from a parking spot is relatively assured. Just stay on your toes and look over your shoulder. Plus, many of today’s cars have a backup cam that provides another way to see behind the vehicle.

That covers the mainstay of the favored aspects about doing the forward first, known too as the head-in, or pull-in parking option.

The nose out camp argues that the most sensible way to park involves reversing or backing into a parking spot. They assert that it is rare that a parking spot proffers any difficulties getting into, such that if backing up is considered a dicey form of driving, best to do so when getting into a spot. Might as well take your time and back into the parking spot, which will then ease your efforts when later on exiting from the space.

When exiting from a parking space, you are now looking forward and able to use all the facilities that are associated with driving ahead. This makes indubitably good sense since the act of resuming your place into the busy lane of traffic requires the greatest precision and driving control. In addition, they point out that the driver can make eye contact with pedestrians that are walking nearby the car as you are exiting from the parking spot. This allows a driver to wave at those pedestrians or even possibly signal to a driver that is coming down the lane that they should either proceed or requesting them to temporarily halt while the car comes out of the parking space.

I believe that summarizes the back-in or so-called reverse parking, often described as the nose out positioning.

The nose out camp is apt to gleefully emphasize that most police cars and similar first responders tend to park using the back-in method. This showcases that there is an inherent advantage of being able to rapidly exit from a parking spot when the time comes to do so.

Take that, the nose outs exclaim.

The nose-in camp raises their eyebrows and asks how often a non-first-responder would ever need to screech and peel out of a parking spot, which presumably should be never. For those everyday drivers, perhaps the notion of parking via the back-in approach is tantamount to thinking that they can exit from a parking spot by putting the pedal to the floor and zooming out.

Bad idea that invites crazed driving, the head-in supporters would exhort.

Another bitter dispute is the impact on traffic and the creation of undue traffic delays. The nose-in camp claims that the back-in method causes all sorts of confusion and traffic snarling, waiting for the driver to inch their way into a parking spot, especially dicey since they often have gone past the spot and need to back-up initially to even get close to the spot. The back-in camp contends that the worst traffic woes are due to the nose-in drivers that can’t seem to smoothly back out of a parking spot, often doing so in a staggered and exasperating way, starting and stopping repeatedly, as though they are at a complete loss of how to properly drive a car.

The back-in drivers tend to believe they are superior drivers altogether. This snobbishness then irks the forward-first drivers. Tempers can flare. It is one thing to have tempers emerge when simply debating the merits of either method, yet an altogether more serious matter when road rage surfaces.

You’ve likely seen drivers that wait patiently for a reverse parking car. Even those with grand patience are at times pushed over the brink. You idiot, they are imploring, park your car the “right way” and it wouldn’t take you so long to get into that freaking parking spot. Some of these waiting drivers get so frustrated that they begin to yell at the other car or take insidious action that ought not to be undertaken.

Of course, the same can be said of the back-in drivers that are waiting when another car is trying to back out of a parking spot. Those drivers watch as the backing out driver agonizingly moves out of the spot, for which glaciers have been known to proceed at a faster pace. It can be so exasperating that the back-in driver screams out to the other car and urges them to get a brain, ostensibly suggesting they should henceforth use the back-in method. Those words can sometimes also become undue actions such as fisticuffs, though hopefully rarely goes that far.

Cities and local parking operators have tried various experiments to see what works best.

In some locales, you are legally required to park head-in, or legally required to park nose out, depending upon what the local ordinances and driving rules state. Signs such as “Park Heading In” are placed on display, as are signs that say “If You Can’t Pull Through, Please Back-In” (this is another one-off kind of parking circumstance, whereby in some parking lots they have two spaces back-to-back and you are intended to pull forward into the space at the head of the pair).

Additional complications occur when the lanes are one-way for feeding into or out of a set of parking spaces. There is also the matter of parking spots that are angled directionally versus those parking spots that are perfectly perpendicular to the lanes. In short, the design of the parking lot has a lot to do with whether one method is “best” in the given situation, wherein parking is somewhat dictated by how the parking lot maker wants you to park your car.

Going against the grain can be dangerous.

When a parking lot is designed for one of the methods, those that obstinately decide they are still going to park as they always have (assuming it isn’t the approach recommended or insisted upon by the parking lot operator), they are asking for trouble. All or most of the other drivers are presumably going to abide by the parking lot rules, meanwhile, the oddball driver won’t accede and therefore confounds other drivers and can spark unrest.

There is also the matter of customs or generally accepted practices. Suppose a parking lot allows for whichever parking method the drivers so prefer. If most of the drivers aim to use say head-in, the contrarian driver of the back-in method is bound to generate consternation. Likewise, if most of the drivers opt to back-in, and an occasional head-in arrives, there will be a clash of cultures.

A typical refrain involves asking the rhetorical question as to why should one drive the “stupid” way that other drivers do, simply because those dolts have the majority?

Or, if you like, just because everyone else is going to jump off a cliff or leaping off the end of a pier, does that mean you need to do so too (this is a classic line amongst parents and children, in case you’ve never experienced it before)?

Okay, the whole topic is quite a mess, and it would seem that the heated discourse and rampant name-calling is going to continue indefinitely.

Wait for a second, maybe it won’t be an ever-present dilemma. The future of cars holds that we will inevitably have self-driving cars. Perhaps that is the answer to this frightfully unresolvable but indeed solvable problem.

Here’s the question to consider: Will AI-based true self-driving cars opt to park via the head-in approach or via the back-in method?

If we can answer that question, perhaps we’ll have dealt with this matter once and for all.

Let’s unpack things and see.

Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless vehicles are considered a Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some contend, see my coverage at this link here).

Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).

For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Self-Driving Cars And Parking Styles

For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.

All occupants will be passengers.

The AI is doing the driving.

Recall that we were perched on the edge of our seats, waiting breathlessly to find out whether self-driving cars are going to be parking via the head-in method or alternatively by the use of the back-in approach.

Is this up to the divine wisdom of some disembodied AI system that perhaps has achieved super-intelligence and therefore can utterly settle this open question?

Well, actually, there isn’t such a thing as super-intelligent AI, and nor is there even AI that has reached human levels of intelligence. Anyone that tries to con you otherwise is merely either confused or seeking to mislead you as to the current state of AI. AI doesn’t have common-sense reasoning and nor is it sentient. Perhaps, far in the future, this might be attained, but currently do not hold your breath.

The point is that we cannot look to AI as our seer that can resolve this question about the approach to parking.

In fact, the reality is that the AI will do whatever it has been programmed to do (assuming that the system comports with its programming and otherwise is essentially bug-free, etc.).

Even the heralded use of Machine Learning (ML) does not make-or-break the answer to the parking question. If you collected a ton of data about car parking and fed that data into a Machine Learning or Deep Learning (DL) algorithm, presumably the computationally pattern matching would identify the two types of parking, though deciding which is the better would not be especially part of the pattern identification.

If the parking data came from a parking lot or set of parking lots whereby the tendency was to park via the head-in approach, the ML/DL would tend to settle on using the head-in approach, merely because it was the more prevalent one in the data utilized. Similarly, if you collected and fed data from parking lots that had mainly nose out parkers, the ML/DL would tend to opt toward the nose out method.

You could say that there isn’t any right or wrong approach per se.

Here’s what that means.

If a self-driving car has been programmed or “learned” to park using either of the two methods, it would presumably use the “right” method for the appropriate circumstance. A parking lot that has established a head-in only provision would therefore be abided by and the AI would park via the forward first method. Upon encountering a parking lot that stated the nose out method must be used the AI would conform accordingly.

The AI doesn’t “care” which method is to be used (I’ve put quotes around the word “care” because it is crucial to not anthropomorphize AI and ascribe human-like emotional qualities, which regrettably many are doing and it is misleading and inappropriate).

Just as many human drivers are switch hitters when it comes to choosing the back-in versus head-in, the AI would select the method too that is suitable for the given parking lot and the parking conditions therein.

A slight wrinkle to this ambidextrous notion is that by-and-large self-driving cars are currently devised for forward-driving purposes and less so for backing up. The sensors on a self-driving car are usually focused on whatever is in front of the vehicle and there tend to be more such devices and of a stronger caliber aimed in that direction. Some self-driving car designers believe that ultimately the vehicles used for self-driving ought to be equally versatile in going forwards and in reverse, so much that there really should no longer be a distinction and essentially the vehicle will always be going forward, no matter whether at the presumed head or tail of the car (see my coverage at this link here).

In short, in today’s world, similar to how human drivers are seemingly less apt at driving in reverse, so too are the existing crop of self-driving cars (generally this is the case, though there are exceptions). This raises once again the overarching question as to when is the backing up activity to be best undertaken, assuming it is the weakest link of the driving task for both humans and AI.

Another factor that needs due consideration entails the driving choices of human drivers that might be driving nearby to the self-driving car. Though some dreamily think we are going to have only self-driving cars on our roadways, the reality is that for many decades we will have a mix of both human-driven cars and self-driving cars. The advent of self-driving cars won’t happen overnight and nor will the approximate 250 million conventional human-driven cars in the U.S. alone disappear suddenly.

So, the twist is the facet that a self-driving car will need to make a choice about the parking method and do so amidst human drivers that are nearby.

Should the self-driving car park in the same manner that other human-driven cars are doing?

Perhaps not, if those human drivers are not conforming to whatever the parking lot or locale has stated is the appropriate method to be used. Generally, the odds are that most self-driving cars will be programmed to drive as lawfully as possible, though I’ve pointed out in my columns that there will need to be exceptions allowed (see my analysis at this link here).

If human drivers are parking via say the back-in method, and there is no overt proclamation at the parking lot about which way to park, it would make sense for the AI to opt toward using the back-in approach. This though also assumes that the AI is able to ascertain that drivers are parking in that manner.

At this time, few self-driving cars are being crafted with software that examines how other cars are parked, and therefore the AI would not have any direct means of deciding what the parking prevalence seems to be.

Overall, most of the automakers and self-driving tech firms would suggest that the parking method selection is an edge or corner case, namely that on the list of priorities it is a quite low priority. You’ll find that usually the AI developers have crafted whatever they perceive as the most common approach to parking, such as the head-in, and ergo the AI is instructed or commanded to always take that approach, regardless of any other indications that might arise.

Conclusion

We can add some flair to this discussion about the parking methods by pointing out that self-driving cars will be employing V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) electronic communications.

This is important because it allows the AI of one self-driving car to communicate with the AI of other nearby self-driving cars. For example, suppose a self-driving car comes upon debris in the roadway, it can electronically message other self-driving cars to be watchful and avoid that debris. The V2V function is going to enable all kinds of systemic acts of vehicular coordination and collaboration, which today we get only by happenstance in a human-driving world.

Here’s how the V2V comes to play in the riddle of the parking methods.

A self-driving car enters into a parking lot that it has not been in before. Another self-driving car that is already in the parking lot could be contacted, via V2V, and the AI could advise the newly entering self-driving car that it makes the most sense to park head-in. That seems to settle the matter and the AI of the self-driving car seeking to park would likely use the head-in approach.

If there are only self-driving cars allowed in the parking lot, this makes life even easier. In that case, it could be that the AI of each self-driving car can choose whatever it prefers. This is so because all of the self-driving cars are going to be able to communicate with each other whenever they are backing up, regardless of how parked, and all other of the self-driving cars can adjust and plan their routing in the parking lot accordingly.

You do not necessarily need all of the self-driving cars to park in the same manner. Their ability to coordinate allows for whichever parking method happens to have been utilized by each self-driving car.

Now, you can make an argument that things would be even smoother if they did agree to use the same method, but that’s a discussion for another day.

The next time you decide to park your car, give some thought to whether you are using the head-in approach or the nose out method. Look around to see what the parking lot has stipulated or ascertained if there any local ordinances that state what parking approach is to be used. Judge too what the local custom or cultural practice seems to be.

And, when you see a self-driving car enter the parking lot, keep your eye on it. Others that haven’t read this column will assume that whatever the AI chooses is seemingly the irrefutably correct approach, but you can hold your head high and be as snobbish as you want, emphasizing that just because the AI did it that way, this doesn’t mean that us humans have to jump off a cliff or leap off a pier.

No AI can tell us to do that.