Looking at replacing the 11 year old estate which just fits between our house and next door (with the wooden gates folded back pretty flat against the walls. There is enough room but it can be a bit of a fiddle.
The new cars all seem to be between 7 and 10 cms wider - when you only have about 18cms to play with now....
May need to look at replacing the gates - what would be the thinest material to use to give as much space as possible?
Because people are?
Jonathan
I think it is to meet standard "side impact" accidents.
Sheet metal could be made thinner than wooden gates, as could fabricated metal ones, but do they need to fold back against the walls? Perhaps you need a portcullis.
Side impact protection is the main reason that cars have got wider over the years.
Do you really need a gate? If you do, could it slide to one side, or lift (either vertically or like and up and over garage door) instead of folding back against the walls?
Find a half-gate level crossing that's being upgraded full-gate?... ;)
jgh
Graphene
Sliding gate?
Thinnest gates that do not look crap would be 1x2" steel box welded into a frame and clad with thin wood on the outside. Look just like regular gates. My mate did did some years ago.
Funny you should say this. Behind our house is an estate built in the late
60s early 70s, and each house has a garage in a block to the side of each terrace. These wer fine back then, but now nobody uses them as there is not enough room to actually get out of the car when its in the garage. so what is the reason for this trend. it also impacts roads which were narrower in those days, and now they have to park with two wheels on the pavement or emergency vehicles can't get past.I don't know the answer, though I know by the bruises that wing mirrors are a lot bigger than they used to be, and even folded they are a bit fat.
Maybe its all these air bags in the doors etc, that is the problem. Brian
Surprised they have gates, most folk around here simply leave the whole of their frontage open so poor blind folk end yup in their gardens.
Brian
All cars are getting wider, longer and heavier, driven(!) by safety requirements and customer demand for more and more toys.
The Smart ForTwo is shorter and marginally narrower than a Morris Minor :) And also perhaps an example of customer demand for toys ;)
You need space to slow a vehicle down when it hits you, so as side impact protection improves, cars have to get wider.
Door mirrors need room for the motors inside that allow for remote adjustment and for folding back.
+1
replying to newshound, dave wrote: There are some very small cars e.g. the Volkswagen UP that can still satisfy safety requirements so this can't be the reason for wider cars.
Round here the problem is now so bad that garages built only around ten years ago are too small to allow the ocupants out when in the garage! Brian
Ahead of their time perhaps? Sounds as if they were designed for the new breed of BMWs which can be parked by remote control without the driver needing to be in the car.
That's because they were tarts and made the garage too small in the first place!
Our rented house was less than 10 years old and a Deawoo Lanos was a tight fit.
Silly sods could easily have added 1ft to every garage - it would have made naff all difference losing 1ft off the kitchen/diner which was long anyway.
My last house, which was brand new in 2000, had a garage in a block that was built at the time. The garage was just about wide enough to open a door enough to squeeze in or out of the car, though it was a very tight squeeze. OK, I had have had to park carefully because there was a breezeblock pillar (maybe to give the wall between my garage and my neighbour's garage a bit of extra strength).
But the up-and-over doorway was *way* too narrow. I only once parked my car in the garage and that was overnight when a toerag had broken a window and tried to break into the car (thank goodness for deadlocks). And it took a long time to position myself accurately because there was only about 3" on each side. And that was for a Peugeot 306 - hardly a big car.
For most purposes, those garages were useless as car storage and everyone used them as overflow loft storage and kept their car on the allocated open-air parking for the second car in the family, which meant that my girlfriend had to find parking elsewhere whenever she came to stay. Even a guy with an old-style (Austin/Morris, rather than BMW) Mini said the garage door openings were a bit tight.
The doorways were probably about 18" narrower than the garages that they gave access to.
Interestingly, other neighbours whose garages were in another nearby block all used their garages, so I wonder if those had wider doors and/or garages.
Don't have that problem in our new house: there's no garage and the driveway is wide enough to fit two cars (including my wife's big Honda CVR) side by side and for my Peugeot to get in and out even when the CRV is parked opposite the gap in the hedge and my car is in the offset space. Takes courage to reverse straight towards her car before swinging round and missing it by about 6 inches at the closest point before swinging back to avoid the boundary hedge - one of those things that you take slowly and have to try several times till you've got the hang of it, and passenger's door mirror is always needed to check for clearance from the CRV.
I think its something to do with the average driver getting wider.
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