Improbable Parking Skills

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

What better way to demonstrate a Badass Driver's skill than by Improbable Parking Skills, especially with Parallel Parking.

Sometimes Improbable Parking Skills are demonstrated by parking a vehicle efficiently in adverse conditions. In other cases, though, the driver chooses a difficult parking method to save time, or simply to show off.

One common method is to pull the handbrake while turning, using the drift to get the car exactly where you want it (as seen in Blues Brothers). Expect screeching tires. Other nigh-impossible parking stunts include making the car climb or jump over other cars, fall from a height, roll over, etc.

Not to be confused with Rock Star Parking, which is about it being easy to find a space.

Examples of Improbable Parking Skills include:


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Film - Animation

  • In The Incredibles, Mr. Incredible first lands a falling van right on the highway, then proceeds to veer so sharply that it rolls over several times before stopping perfectly in a parking space.


Film - Live Action

  • The Blues Brothers
  • Ace Ventura 2: Li~ike a glove!
  • Lt. Shane Wolf and Zoe Plummer from The Pacifier
  • One of Jackie Chan's earlier films has him doing a hand-brake turn/park of a mini, sliding it into a space approximately 1 mini 4 extra cm.
  • Starship Troopers: it was implied that Carmen Ibanez had to have Improbable Parking Skills to land her shuttle in the middle of a besieged Mobile Infantry outpost during a fierce battle. Of course, she had already been established as the Ace Pilot.
    • That was less a case of being skilled enough to land in the middle of the area (considering the shuttles were virtually VTOL craft to begin with) as it was she was the only one insane enough to actually do it in the middle of a millions-strong wave of incoming Arachnids.
  • In the first National Lampoon's Vacation movie, Clark falls asleep at the wheel, the car wanders onto an exit ramp, careens toward a hotel, and Clark wakes up in time to scream and stomp the brakes. The car stops in a parking spot, and the luggage all tumbles off the top of the car to boot.

Clark: "Well, we're here!"

  • In Luc Besson's Taxi and sequels, Daniel likes to parallel-park by drifting, usually making at least a half-turn in the process.
  • Undercover Brother: in the last scene of the movie, the title character spins his car into a perfect parking position at a curb.


Live Action TV

  • Due South: there is an episode where Ray puts his 1972 Buick Riviera into a controlled skid over a large field of ice to bring it sliding to a stop immediately next to Fraser and the guest star. Both of them gave him a mild What the Hell, Hero?, which he casually shrugged off.
  • Inverted in the British road safety promo "The Saga of Reginald Molehusband", where the title character's parking skills are so awful they always draw a large crowd, until the day he finally gets it right. Unfortunately it only seems to exist now as an off-air audio recording.
  • Mr. Bean thrives on this.
  • In My Wife and Kids, Junior was trying to show his dad how he could drive responsibly and that he was maturing and parallel parked his car perfectly in less than a second.
  • In the American version of Top Gear, Rally driver and presenter Tanner Faust teaches a blind man to drift. His final challenge is to drift-parallel park, which is pulled off perfectly.


Video Games

  • The Pigmask who takes you directly to Thunder Tower in Mother 3 pilots the Pork Bean in a rather hap-hazard looking manner, before sliding perfectly in front of the entrance, thereby locking you in with no choice but to continue on to the end of the chapter.

Pigmask: That was some pretty sweet piloting, if I do say so myself.


Western Animation

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