One of the four manoeuvres a DVSA examiner can ask you for — and the one most learners dread. Practise it here with the car set up the way you will actually drive it: right-hand drive, driving on the left, kerb on your nearside. Live coaching on every stage, and as many attempts as you want.
Same seat, same side of the road, same reference points.
The whole scene is mirrored for UK roads. The reference points you learn — where the kerb sits in the nearside mirror, when the car in front lines up — are the ones you will use on the day.
The examiner wants you parallel and close without touching. Your distance is shown as you reverse, so you learn what 30 cm actually looks like from the driving seat.
Mounting the kerb is a serious fault. Every touch is counted here instead, so you find out where your judgement is off before it costs you the test.
Overhead shows you the geometry — where the car pivots, how far the nose swings out. The driving view, with three mirrors, shows you what you will really have to work with.
Three steps from cold start to parked.
The simulator drops you beside the car in front. Get level with it, about half a metre out, and stop.
Prompts tell you when to go to full left lock, when to straighten, and when to swing the nose in.
Repeat until you end up parallel and within about 30 cm of the kerb without touching it. Your time and corrections are tracked.
Written for a right-hand-drive car on the left of the road.
A reversing car turns about its rear axle, not its middle and not its front wheels. That single fact explains almost everything that feels counter-intuitive about parallel parking: why the back of the car tucks in so much faster than you expect, and why the nose swings a long way out into the road while it does. The overhead view is worth a few attempts on its own, just to watch that happen.
Not elegance. Control, observation, and where you end up. You are allowed to correct — a single pull-up to straighten out is normal and is not itself a fault. What fails candidates is mounting the kerb, reversing without looking, or blocking the road while a car waits. If anything approaches mid-manoeuvre, stop and let it past; waiting is never marked against you.
More detail on how faults are marked: 7 parking faults that fail the UK driving test.
Yes. It is one of the four manoeuvres the examiner can ask for, alongside reverse bay parking, forward bay parking, and pulling up on the right then reversing about two car lengths. You will be asked for one of them, not all four.
Parallel to the kerb and within about 30 cm of it, without touching it. Stopping much wider than that starts to attract a fault; mounting the kerb is normally marked as a serious fault and ends the test.
Yes. A single correction to straighten up is expected and is not a fault in itself. What gets marked is a shuffle that goes on and on, or one that leaves you further out of position than you started.
Yes — this page defaults to left-hand traffic, so you sit on the right and reverse towards a kerb on your nearside. Every coaching prompt swaps sides to match.
No. It cannot teach clutch control and it cannot teach you to look properly at the right moment, which is where most manoeuvre faults come from. It gets the geometry and the sequence into your head so your lessons with an approved driving instructor go on the things that need a real car.