Regardless of your spatial awareness or how long you've been behind the wheel, parking can be a tricky skill to master at the best of times, and accidents can happen.
So, when it comes to parking, is going in reverse the way forward?
Driving instructor Stephen Potter said backing into a parking spot is "definitely the preferred option" to avoid a trip to the panel beater.
"I'd certainly be an advocate of reversing into it if it's possible," Potter told Seven Sharp.
He said parking in reverse into a perpendicular spot is safer due to the increased visibility.
"When you're reversing into the park, hopefully it should be clear and there's not too many hazards to have to deal with. You can back into it quite easily and when you come out, you're coming out forwards so you have a much better view of what's in front of you and all the mobile hazards that could be moving through that car park like small children, pedestrians, bicycles — anything like that.
"It's much easier to deal with that when you're coming out forwards."
He said it's "a lot harder to see those hazards" when you're coming out of a parking spot backwards.
Potter said while a quarter of crashes per year occur when driving forward into a parking spot, "we only do maybe a couple of kilometres a year going backwards compared to thousands of kilometres going forwards during the year".
"That's not a great stat, so if you can help to mitigate that by backing into a car park, it's certainly a good thing."
Another advantage of reverse parking is a vehicle's height, which varies from front to rear.
"Some cars these days are quite low so if you're going into something that's perpendicular to the kerb and you're going in frontways, there is potential, sometimes, that you can strike the front of your vehicle on the kerb, whereas if you're backing a car in, it's generally higher in the back and there's less chance of that happening.
"It saves fuel when it saves time as well, believe it or not."
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