How to reverse a car

Safety and convenience. They’re two compelling reasons for using a car’s reversing camera, mirrors and acoustic guidance to reverse into a parking spot or a driveway.

Many people still look over their shoulder when reversing a car. But at low speeds, and particularly around children, turning your head to look over your shoulder while reversing could be much more dangerous than the alternative.

That alternative is to check mirrors and the reversing camera display constantly. Use whatever technology you have to enhance safety, in other words.

Backing with the mirrors adjusted correctly and the car’s reversing camera output displayed in the infotainment screen, you can see both rear corners of the car and anything directly behind but below the window line (like a small child), leaving plenty of time to react.

Imagine this scenario: You’re approaching home. The entire street is clear of cars and pedestrians as far as the eye can see, in both directions. You flick the right indicator on and bring the car to a halt in the middle of the road before selecting reverse. Turning in your seat, you look back over your right shoulder as you begin reversing the car across the crown of the street into your driveway.

What you don’t realise is a young kid on a bike is approaching from behind at a speed of around 20km/h. He’s been riding along the footpath across the street and has presumed from your wide line with the right indicator operating that you plan to nose the car into the neighbour’s driveway further up. He veers right, intending to cross the street behind your car. He’s in your blind spot on the left, on a collision course.

The young cyclist realises at the last moment as the car pulls up and the reversing lights illuminate that he’s about to collide with the car. At the speed he’s travelling, he can’t stop in time and is so close that he can barely swerve to avoid impact. He manages to steer away from the rear of the moving car and jumps off the bike in the nick of time.

Unfortunately, as the car reverses, right-hand down, the nose swings around and the front left wheel runs over the top of the bike where the kid has dropped it on the bitumen.

The first thing you know about this is the sound of steel crumpling and a rough bumping sensation as the wheel rides up over the bike. You brake immediately, your head swivels to the left… and there’s this young kid standing next to the car’s front passenger side door, staring at you in shocked amazement and about to burst into tears at the sight of his ruined bike.

Even without reverse AEB (autonomous emergency braking) and rear cross traffic alert, watching both external mirrors out of the periphery of your vision you might have seen the kid even before he made his disastrous choice.

According to the medical profession, each of our eyes has a horizontal ‘visual field’ of about 135 degrees. Factoring in the overlap around our nose, the combined horizontal visual field for our two eyes works out at around 210 degrees, but only a spread of 114 degrees is actually binocular.

However, in a short, sweeping glance lasting a fraction of a second, that 114-degree scope can take in the two exterior mirrors and the reversing camera display (or internal mirror, in a car without a camera). Your peripheral vision can keep tabs on one mirror when you’re fully occupied focusing on the other.

With mirrors and the reversing camera, your field of vision is expanded to almost 360 degrees at any given moment.

If you turn your head over 90 degrees to look back over your shoulder as you reverse the car, you may be blind to the 45 degrees on the other side of the car – the side near a concrete bollard, a brick wall or a car in the adjacent parking spot, but you will hear it when the nose of the car on that side makes contact.

And if you’re looking over your right shoulder, your 210 degrees of view will be impeded 30 or 40 degrees – probably more – by that great big lump of a central B-pillar, there to ensure the roof doesn’t crush you if the car should roll.

Furthermore, you won’t be able to see either of the rear wheels from the driving seat, so you run the risk of scuffing a rim when you drive up over the gutter.

Finally, there’s yet another sound reason for using the mirrors and camera to reverse, particularly if you’re older. If you suffer from arthritis, chronic back pain or some other pertinent physiological condition, turning the head to look over your shoulder may be difficult and painful.

For many drivers, intuitively understanding the car’s relationship to its surroundings when viewed through a mirror or a video display is a problem. It just doesn’t feel natural to apply right-hand lock on the steering wheel to back the car into a driveway or parking spot on the right.

This may be because the car is actually turning left from your perspective if you’re looking back over your shoulder. It’s due to confusion arising out of the coriolis effect; drivers are applying steering wheel torque in the wrong direction to turn car.

Even if the driver is using the reversing camera to back, the temptation is there to turn the steering wheel anti-clockwise to back the car to the right. It’s even more confusing if you’re backing a trailer, and as for those drivers who back road trains, fair dinkum, they are multi-spatial geniuses.

The best way to overcome this problem with spatial relationships is sheer practice. Keep it up and turning the steering wheel in the correction direction eventually becomes second nature.

As with anything you’re attempting for the first time in a car, find an empty car park, where there are no obstacles to hit, but there are painted lines on the road surface to help you line up the car using mirrors and reversing camera.

Set up your mirrors correctly. If you have a multi-position memory function that includes the exterior mirror settings, program one position for an optimal view when parking.

Adjusting mirrors for parking and backing – checklist

• For freeway driving, adjust the mirrors splayed outwards to eliminate the blind spot.
• For low-speed manoeuvring, adjust for a narrower angle of view.
• Keep the flanks of the vehicle visible in each respective mirror (door handles visible).
• Dip the mirrors slightly to pick up the rear wheels in the lower inboard corners of the mirror.
• Program into the position memory if that function is available.

Always take your time when practising. Keep the vehicle’s speed low until you become adept. Use the reversing camera’s guidelines (and dynamic guidelines too, if your vehicle has them), to line up the car and straighten up in alignment with the painted lines of the parking space.

When the dynamic guidelines are aligned with the static guidelines in the video display, and both are aligned with the painted lines on the road, the car is lined up perfectly and can be backed straight into the parking space.

When the lateral static line in the display ‘touches’ the white painted line at the rear of the parking space, you can bring the car to a complete stop. There should be enough room remaining at the rear of the car to open the tailgate freely.

Once you’ve tried this a few times, you’ll be better at backing without turning your head; you’ll be able to reverse into the driveway at home without the inside rear wheel bouncing over the gutter, or any sheet metal or the rear bumper cover making contact with the gates on either side.

A point to bear in mind when backing at night and in the rain: the camera’s view may be obscured by rain drops and the picture in the video display could be quite grainy in the low light. It would pay to give the camera lens a quick wipe to clear the screen, and turn on household lighting (spot lights on the front porch or lights inside the garage) to highlight darker objects close to your course.

If you’re regularly parking in a garage and you don’t have a reversing camera, learn to line up part of the car’s structure with a ‘landmark’ (the B-pillar of the car with a steel support for the garage trusses, as one example).

At any point while learning, stop and secure the car, and walk around it to see where it is – compared with where you thought it should be.

And before long, you’ll be parking like a pro.