Parking in the Same Spot Every Time

Set the position first, then make it repeatable. In a garage that is genuinely tight, where the car stops decides whether a door opens, whether you can walk down one side and whether anything can be worked on — and it is the one variable that costs nothing to change.

Of the three ways to make it repeatable, the cheapest is the one to try first, and it is not a compromise.

A note on this guide: this is assessed from how each method works rather than from a garage here. See how we test.

The problem, as it appears

The car goes in a little differently every time. Some days both doors open; some days the passenger side is against a wall and someone has to climb across. The bonnet is sometimes clear of the shelf at the far end and sometimes not.

None of this is a driving problem. It is that a driver has no reliable depth reference when the front of the car is beyond their field of view and the walls on both sides are too close to judge.

Why "I'll just be careful" disappoints

The same reason it fails on doors: it works until it does not, and it takes attention every single time. It also degrades — a position that was deliberate in week one becomes approximate by month three, and the approximation always drifts towards the middle of the garage, which is the worst place for it.

Reversing in makes it harder rather than easier, and reversing in is usually the right thing to do in a small garage because it puts the door on the side you need and the exhaust nearer the opening.

What actually matters

Which dimension you are actually fixing

Depth — how far forward — is what a floor stop fixes, and it is what most products address.

Lateral position — how far left or right — is what decides whether a door opens in a narrow garage, and it is the one people forget to solve. In most tight garages this is the dimension that matters, and a floor stop says nothing about it.

The good news is that a single hanging reference solves both at once, because a ball hanging at a fixed point tells you where the car is in three dimensions relative to it, not just one.

That the reference is where you are already looking

Any guide that needs you to turn your head or check a mirror competes with the mirror you are already using to reverse. The ones that get used are the ones in your existing line of sight.

That it survives being knocked

A hanging ball that gets pushed swings back. A laser that gets knocked stays knocked, and it lies to you silently from then on.

The options, and who each suits

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A hanging guide — a ball on a line from the ceiling, positioned to touch the windscreen at the right moment — suits almost everybody. It solves depth and lateral position together, needs no power, cannot lose calibration, and works in the dark. It is on this site's list of free fixes we recommend first for the good reason that a tennis ball and a length of string does the whole job.

A parking stop block suits a garage with a flat clean floor where depth is the only issue — a deep garage with plenty of side clearance and something fragile at the far end. It is definite in a way a visual guide is not, since you feel it.

A laser guide suits the specific case where nothing can hang from the ceiling: a sectional door running on overhead tracks, or a ceiling storage rack in the way. It needs a socket and it holds alignment only until something disturbs it.

A convex mirror solves a different half of the problem — seeing the far corner or the wall on the blind side while manoeuvring, rather than knowing when to stop.

The mistake to avoid

Setting the guide before deciding the position. The guide's job is to repeat a decision, and if the decision was "wherever the car happened to be on the day I fitted it", it will repeat that faithfully for years.

Park, get out, open both doors fully, and walk around the car. Move it until both sides work rather than one, and until whatever is at the far end is clear. Then set the reference to that position.

The second mistake is treating this as a parking problem when it is a space problem. If no position exists where both doors open, the guide is not the fix — the fix is one of the other steps in working on a car in a garage that is too small, and protecting what the doors reach is covered in stopping car doors hitting garage walls.