PARK-ME-ELMO

Just as I was getting comfortable having autos tell drivers where to turn, now one of those new-fangled cars, a Lexus I believe, does the one thing my mother, my sister, my wife and my daughter have never done successfully. Parallel park.

With the exception of my 14-year old daughter, whose unblemished parking record owes itself to her non-driving status, all the others have peeled back the sides of their cars and returned home with no explanation for why their vehicles shed their passenger sides. Maybe it's just my family.

Anyway, as an excellent parallel parker, I'm skeptical of machines entrusted to perform such complex tasks as parallel parking. A one-time resident of New York City, I learned to routinely shoehorn cars into spaces smaller than they were.

With a combination of advanced physics and wanton nudging, I was able to fit 10-foot cars into 6-foot spaces. After airbags were introduced, this was no longer possible. Even wearing a football helmet, the bags took their toll.

But even now when I parallel park, you can barely slip waxed dental floss between my car's bumper and those who would sandwich me in. And I've never picked up as much as a scratch.

Please understand me. Men are not better drivers than women. But historically, men have had to do the heavy parking. Backing chariots into parking spaces could not have been easy for gladiators in ancient Rome. And I don't expect women to see parked cars as the personal threats I do. Call it a blind spot, but I won't ask strangers for directions, and they won't learn how to parallel park. Or back up for that matter.

Why do certain people look out the front window when they are backing up? They'd prefer to see the world moving away from them, than the 90-year old man with osteoporosis flailing beneath their rear tires. My wife once dragged a Walmart shopping cart that had become wedged under her car, all the way home: a trip of 25 miles. Thank God the woman pushing the cart had let go.

My mother once tried to back out of parking space facing the front of a laundromat. She thought she had the car in "Reverse," so naturally she was looking out the front windshield at the laundromat. As it turned out, the car was in "Drive" and straining against the cement restrainer designed to keep her car from entering the laundromat.

Thinking it a problem of throttle, Mom goosed the gas. When the four-barrel kicked in, she hopped over the restrainer, and rocketed through the window of the laundromat. The sympathetic cop trying to calm her, explained she must not have seen the window getting closer given she was looking behind her. No, she corrected him. She saw the whole thing.

I could go on. I remember my sister, after getting a fill-up, backing away from the gas pump and into a telephone pole. The telephone man working at the top of the pole was catapulted to a different area code.

And my wife actually backed over a deer. Can you imagine the look on that deer's face? It was the first deer in history to be killed while frozen in the tail-lights.

Look -- who's counting? We've all had our mishaps. I don't want to get ahead of myself, so I think I'll backup for a moment.

Where was I? Oh, right. A self-parking car. Who would trust a car to parallel park itself? I mean, there are going to be times when you'll be parking between a Porsche and a Jaguar. Serious cars. What -- is Toyota going to send those nice rich people cashier's checks when some little diode goes blink in my Lexus -- and I leave $200,000 worth of cars looking like Sunni limos at a Shia wedding?

At least with Voice Navigation, the worst that can happen is you fall in love with the robo-woman giving you directions. Just don't ask her for directions on how to parallel park.

So, unless you're not a man, pass on the "Park-Me-Elmo" feature. You could well find yourself explaining to the very officer who just bent you over the back of your Lexus, how you destroyed three cars with one ill-conceived push of a button.