Dude where’s my car? Google has the answer to find your parked car

Has this ever happened to you?

You arrive at a shopping mall, park your car, walk in, meet your friends for lunch, grab a couple of essential items and then, it hits you – you have no recollection of where you parked your car…when you are ready to go home you can not even remember where you parked your car?

I have a terrible memory and unless I stop what I am doing and look specifically where I parked, then I will spend 30 minutes wondering around like Sherlock Holmes looking for clues of where I left the vehicle. It gets worse if I park at a multi-level parkade and get on a flight somewhere! I now resort to snapping a picture of where the car is so that I will know where to find it when I scroll through my phone’s gallery.

Thankfully someone at Google suffers from the same short-term-memory-loss and now there is a Save Your Parking option right inside Google Maps.

How to save your parking with Google Maps

You need to update your Google Maps to the latest version on both iOS and Android.

On Android:

Use the Google Maps to get to your destination as normal. Once you arrive and park your car, then tap the blue-dot (the one the shows your location) and you will see “Save your parking”. You will be able to add any notes which are useful if you are parking on a multi-storey parkade eg. “level 10, next to the elevator”.

You can also set a time left so you are alerted 15 minutes before your parking meter runs out of time. Add a photo of your parked car and share your parking location which is actually useful if you have a family member collecting the vehicle or you need to explain to the auto-repair person where your car is located.

On iOS:

Tap on the blue dot and then tap on “Set as parking location”. This adds the parking spot to the map. Tap on the parking label on the map to open up your parking card. You are able to share the location with a friend and you are able to add a picture of your parking area.

This is in addition to the automatic parking detection you might have already noticed in Google Maps for iOS. If you connect to your car using USB audio or bluetooth, your parking spot will be automatically added to the map when you disconnect and exit the vehicle.