A U.K. insurance company has reported that car parking accidents have cost U.K. motorists S$2.47 million and believe the size of new cars now is the cause.

According to the report by specialist Accident Exchange, accidents happening in car parks accounted for 30.85 percent of all claims by the company in the last year. It is an increase of almost 8 percent compared to the previous year and the the company believe that the culprit might actually be the sheer size of their cars.

To put things into perspective, the British government’s recommended length for a parking space is set at 4,800 mm but the average family sedan like the Ford Mondeo is already longer than the space by 71mm.

In an interview with Autocar, the company’s Director of Operations Scott Hamilton-Cooper was quoted, "Drivers are having to squeeze increasingly large cars into spaces that generally haven’t got any larger for a very long time. Almost all of the councils we researched carried over the government’s recommendation, which makes things tight for large cars."

Locally, our parking space is set by the Land Transport Authority at 4,800mm and 2,400mm wide.