How can you misplace a car? Believe it or not, it happens. And more often than you think. Even though they weigh thousands of pounds and can be large enough to spot from a great distance, people often lose their cars in crowded parking lots, cities, or various other situations. If this has never happened to you, congratulations, but you can still get a chuckle from some of these crazy lost car stories.
Losing A Car For Months Or Years
A man in Scotland borrowed his friend's BMW to attend a concert in Manchester, UK, then proceeded to lose the car in a parking lot for six months. After half a year of sitting in a parking garage, the estimated ticket was around $6,000. If only he had a free app that could find his parked car, he could have saved a lot of time and money.
If that story wasn't bad enough, a 76-year old German man forgot where he parked his Volkswagen Passat back in 1997. He reported it stolen, and it was found 20 years later in a parking garage that was about to be demolished. These stories certainly make us feel better about those times we misplaced our car for a few minutes in a crowded parking lot.
No More Abandoned Classics
Every so often, we hear a story of how a Ferrari Ezo was left to rot or an E30 BMW M3 was found in the middle of the woods. Stories like these have become increasingly common, and it isn't unheard of to find exotic cars worth millions of dollars being left abandoned in places around the world. Of course, many of these cars were left behind due to the illegal activities of their owners, but if smartphone apps that can find your lost car existed years ago, we'd probably see far fewer barn find cars today.
A New Solution
Has this ever happened to you - You park your car in a crowded lot, go about your business, then come back to have completely forgotten where you left it? Finding your car in a crowded parking lot isn't easy, and we've all had our fair share of difficulty finding parked cars in the past. Fortunately, a new Android application called Find My Parked Car will help eliminate the problem of losing cars in busy parking lots. Perhaps all of those stories wouldn't have happened if those owners had used this app.
Helping Us Find Our Press Cars
We've already found the app to be useful. Since we get to drive different cars every week, it can sometimes be difficult to remember what car we were just driving after parking it up for a few hours. Automakers love to send us bright, flashy colors that are easy to spot, but other times we test cars that are white or silver and blend in with every other car in the lot.
We once took a Toyota Corolla iM to Disney and immediately found it thanks to its Spring Green Metallic paint. On another occasion, Toyota sent us a white Highlander that took nearly ten minutes to find in a not-so-crowded gym parking lot. With Find My Parked Car, even the white cars are now a cinch to find.
How Does It Work?
This is a wonderfully simple app to use, solving the decades' old problem of how to find a parked car. Once installed, just park and mark the position on the app. Find My Parked Car will use the phone's GPS and mobile networks to remember precisely where the car is parked. Then, when it's time to go back to the car, just click the "Find Car" button on the app and it will give you turn-by-turn directions back to your vehicle.
The app is completely free and can be installed on phones running Android 4.0 and higher. Download it from the Google Play Store here and never lose your car again.
