Cars are becoming too big to find adequate parking, a motoring journalist has claimed.

With the rise in popularity of larger vehicles like SUVs, many are questioning whether car parking spaces are becoming too small to accommodate them.

Traditional parking spaces, designed for smaller cars, may no longer be adequate for today’s larger vehicles.

So, are cars becoming too big to park?

On Lunchtime Live, Motoring Journalist at CompleteCar.ie Dave Humphreys said it’s not our imaginations – cars have gotten bigger.

“It's not your imagination, the spaces are pretty much the same but cars are absolutely getting bigger and people are struggling to find parking,” he said.

“That's the big issue they have because it's not just that one car is bigger, all the cars are getting bigger.

“It's fact that cars have got bigger - for example, I've looked at three really popular cars that people would know: a Toyota Yaris, a small hatchback, when that came out first it was 1.6 metres wide - it's now almost 1.7 metres wide.

“But then you go to the likes of Volkswagen Golf, that's nearly 18 centimetres wider now versus when that first came out right and then almost the same again when you look at a BMW X5 which is like a typical big SUV, when that came out first, it was 1.87 metres wide, now it's 2.0 metres.”

Mr Humphreys said the real difficulty is that when you have a space in between two of these cars, that middle space is getting really hard to fit into if you also have one of those big cars.

Listen back here:

A row of SUVs in a carpark. Image: Jonathan Weiss / Alamy Stock Photo