Whether you’re an experienced driver or you’re a sixteen year old taking your driver’s test, parallel parking can be nerve wracking. Sometimes it’s just hard to determine how much room you have when maneuvering into a spot. Add a busy town street on top of that and you’ve got yourself a pretty stressful situation.
Remember sticking your head out the window of your vehicle to tell just how much space you had? Well that technique went out the window with the addition of parking assistance in most new vehicles.
We now how to use it, but do we really know how your parking sensor actually works? The answer may surprise you.
While parking sensors come in a variety of different brand names depending your vehicle's make, they only come in two systems: ultrasonic and electromagnetic.
Ultrasonic
This type of parking sensor uses radio waves to bounce off other objects. The sensor sends these ultrasonic waves, which reflect off of another object, and then determines the amount of time for the wave to return and any changes in the wavelength itself. This is almost similar to animal echolocation, also called bio sonar. This is the process animals such as bats use to locate and identify objects from the echos they emit. This time, however, the ultrasonic sensor is trying to locate any object coming up on your rear bumper.
The ultrasonic does have it’s disadvantages. Excess dirt and grime can build up to cause the sensors to malfunction. It is also true that things like blood, plastic, and flash cannot always be detected by the ultrasonic sensors.
Electromagnetic
If your sensor isn’t ultrasonic, then it is almost guaranteed to be electromagnetic. This method uses a transceiver strip that creates an elliptical near field behind the car that picks up the voltage charge and sends information to the driver through a beeping noise. Unlike the ultrasonic method, electromagnetic sensor are much better at detecting moving objects in your way.
So fear not next time you have to parallel park, let your sensor do the work for you.
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